The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  At Saint Peter’s College, Emmett had been educated in the sect’s fierce intellectual style, where everything hinged on obedience and evidence. Their teaching emphasized a nimble brain. Logic was lightning fast or it was lax. The brothers would grill pupils constantly, relentlessly. Why do you say that and Give me a reason were common refrains. They had taught Emmett discipline, that the quality of his thinking and his arguments was as important as the quality of the result. When he graduated from college and left for the monastery in Hyde Park, New York, intent on taking his vows, he believed it was logic leading him there. Except logic didn’t live in his heart.

  Feeling the grain of the floorboards grinding into his knees, Emmett prayed from rote. That night, his prayers sparked a memory. It was about one of the priests from the abbey who had been sent to do missionary work in the Pacific islands. The main territory of the New York Province had long been the Philippines, a highly civilized region seeded with a healthy amount of Catholic converts, thus not a hardship post. At the end of World War II, the pope broadened the province’s scope to include the South Pacific, a less cushy and less predictable destination. The picturesque locale of thatched huts and palm trees bore the threat of mosquitoes, malaria, and the absence of modern medical care. During his mission, the young priest contracted a case of tuberculosis so serious it sunk to the bone. Every couple of months, he would return to the States to recuperate at Saint Andrew’s. Once well enough, he would travel back to some remote island to resume his work. Emmett had watched him grow paler and more frail with each passing visit. In time, he ceased to see him altogether. The tuberculosis had killed the young priest. Emmett couldn’t recall a funeral, however the other novices whispered about his sacrifice with reverence. His story was as much heroic myth as a cautionary tale. That was the Jesuit way. To toil and not seek rest. To labor and not ask for a reward. To give and not count the cost.

  Jesuits called themselves “Ours.” Everyone else was an Extern, an outsider. The teenage boys Emmett encountered at Saint Andrew’s hungered to be members of Ours, to be a part of something bigger than themselves, whereas Emmett found himself constantly tabulating the price of what being one of Ours would cost him.

  Cost was a concept Emmett had ample time to contemplate from the Records Room. Newark was a world away from the South Pacific, but like the dying priest, Emmett kept going back to the Fourth Precinct, day in and day out. Penance for past sins, the compulsion had seeped into his bones, and every second he spent in the basement, an Extern from the force, was a second spent not fulfilling his duty. Though he had renounced a life of service to the church, he had taken on a life of service to the city, an act that would have made Saint Casimir proud, yet no sacrifice Emmett made or could ever make would cancel out his wrongdoing from his conscience. The ever-present tug of an invisible chain around his leg was getting tighter and tighter even as he got into bed and uttered another silent prayer that sleep would find him as it had Edward, then Emmett could forget too.

  FIVE

  The night’s events had made the front page of the Thursday morning Star Ledger, though not the headline. Sandwiched between news from Vietnam and a piece about the clash between Israelis and Arabs, the article started off with the caption, “Cops and firemen attacked, stores looted.” The name of the cabdriver, Ben White, was never mentioned. Neither were the names of the officers who had beaten him. The story centered on the dozens of arrests and quoted figures estimating the losses at approximately two thousand dollars, substantial but not irreparable. The police were portrayed as heroes for suppressing the scuffle as quickly as they did, and Director Sloakes was lauded for his command. The word riot was printed only once.

  Edward sat across from Emmett as he read the paper, his wheelchair pulled up to the kitchen table. He poked at the toast Emmett had made for him, uninterested in food. The rustling of the newsprint roused him from his stupor.

  “Was it as bad as they’re making it out to be?” he asked, more to have something to say than because he was curious. Edward hadn’t brought up the bottle of Jim Beam. His bloodshot eyes and the bruise on his forehead from the fall said everything short of an apology. The realization that all of the alcohol in the house was gone had yet to set in.

  “Worse,” Emmett said.

  Whether the papers were willing to acknowledge it or not, the beating of the cabdriver was a wick in the growing powder keg that was the Central Ward. That April, police had gone after picketers peacefully protesting at the Clinton Hill Meat Market. In June came the scandal regarding the potential appointment of James Callaghan to the Board of Education over the better-qualified candidate, Wilber Parker. Callaghan hadn’t gone to college while Parker was the first black man to become a certified public accountant in the state of New Jersey. The residents of the Central Ward were starting to keep score of the city’s blatant indiscretions, the most egregious of which was the proposed demolition of countless homes in the ward to make room for a 150-acre medical school and hospital complex that would bisect the black community. While the city council praised the projects as urban renewal, opponents such as Mose Odett decried it as “negro removal.” Whispers of dissention were turning into war cries. Newark was balanced on a knife’s blade. No matter which side the situation fell, somebody would get cut.

  “Hey. You see that?” Edward pointed at a photo of Elvis Presley and his pregnant wife, Priscilla, on the opposite page. “Elvis is gonna have a baby.”

  Presley’s impending fatherhood was more exciting to him than the riot. The violent clash was yesterday’s news, literally. For Emmett, the shock was still fresh, still vivid.

  “You believe that? Congrats to the King, man.” In his enthusiasm, Edward had spoken too loudly. He winced in pain.

  Emmett cleared his brother’s dish and retrieved a bottle of aspirin from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. “There’s ice in the freezer if your head hurts. I’ll do my best to get home early.”

  “Cool. I’ll be here,” Edward replied, his sarcasm undulled by the hangover, then he picked up the Ledger and flipped to the sports section.

  The newspaper article hadn’t done the damage outside the Fourth Precinct justice. The brick front was scorched from the Molotov cocktail, and the broken windows were boarded up. Along Springfield Avenue, storefronts were replaced by gaping voids. Wet trash littered the sidewalks. The charred remains of the abandoned car hulked on the curb, the sweltering morning air preserving the stench of burnt rubber.

  Patrolmen were posted on the streets to prevent further looting, temporary security for storekeepers who were dredging through what was left of their stock and starting repairs. One man was hammering plywood to replace a broken door. Another was sweeping glass chips into the gutter. The uneasy peace between the neighborhood and the Jewish store owners had been replaced by a palpable anguish and disgust. Decades earlier, the Central Ward had been home to a sizable concentration of immigrant and second-generation Jews, many of whom had recently been decamping to the suburbs of West Orange and Livingston at a head-spinning pace. They weren’t the only ones. Property taxes, the city’s chief source of revenue, had reached an all-time high, driving employers and homeowners into the hills. Newark’s population was over 400,000 and another 500,000 commuted in every day to work at the manufacturing plants, banks, or business conglomerates like Prudential, however, the exodus was beginning to rival the influx. At the current rate, the city would be a ghost town in a matter of years. The local motto had become: Newark was open eight hours a day. That was the duration of Emmett’s shift. For a city, eight hours was the blink of an eye. For Emmett, it might as well have been an eternity.

  The Records Room was uncomfortably quiet that morning. It was as if he were in a bomb shelter and the bomb had already gone off. The file Nolan delivered was lying on his desk. Emmett had no interest in reading it. He paced the aisles, running his hands across the folders as he went. The hushed flicking of paper lulled him to distraction, then the telephone rang, tugging
him into reality. For as long as he had been in the basement, Emmett had never heard the phone ring. He wasn’t sure how to answer.

  “Records.”

  “Can you come up?” Lieutenant Ahern’s voice was hoarse, the strain of a sleepless night. He hadn’t forgotten that Emmett was alive as pledged. Ahern forgot nothing.

  “Your office?”

  “The roof. I’ll meet you.”

  That would be another first for Emmett. He had never been up to the station’s rooftop and had to resist the urge to cross himself as he opened the trap door into the scalding sun. The lieutenant had arrived ahead of him. He was leaning against the waist-high ledge, gazing into the distance and smoking a cigarette with the vigor of a man trying to exhale his problems.

  Emmett joined him at the ledge. From that height, they had an unobstructed view clear to the river. The city was twenty-three miles square—a quarter of which was taken up by the airport, the seaport, and uninhabitable marshland—giving Newark the highest population density of any major city in the country. The statistics paled in comparison to the panorama of the New York City skyline ten miles to the east. By contrast, Newark seemed stunted, an undernourished sibling.

  “Are we sightseeing?” Emmett asked.

  “Figured you could stand some sun. You’re getting too white being in that basement.”

  For a full minute, Ahern said nothing else. He wasn’t the type who had conversations. He talked. Others listened. The lieutenant had built his reputation on what he didn’t do, not on what he did. Once, a detective had made the mistake of getting into a shouting match with him in the third-floor hallway in front of an audience of a dozen officers, intentionally making the argument public. Lieutenant Ahern calmly lectured the detective while backing him toward the stairwell. When the detective went to storm off, he fell down the steps and broke his leg. Ahern never touched him.

  The lieutenant peered at the destruction on the street below. “Thank Christ this shit is over, right?”

  “Right,” Emmett repeated, uncertain if he was agreeing to something else. That concerned him as much as what he was waiting to hear.

  “Yesterday I told you I couldn’t use you. Today’s a different story. This morning a transit worker found the body of a colored kid at the Warren Street subway station.”

  To call the boy “Negro” would have been too progressive for Ahern. “Colored” was an insult, and the lieutenant preferred insults, no matter who they were aimed at.

  “You’ve got four detectives under you. Why recruit from the Records Room?”

  That was as far as Emmett could push. Around Ahern, he had to tread lightly. The lieutenant hadn’t warmed to him when Director Sloakes moved Emmett into the division. Although commanding officers had little say in the composition of their squads, Sloakes had forced Emmett down Ahern’s throat. The lieutenant resented that, and he resented Emmett. In a rare show of benevolence, Ahern had stifled the department inquest into Emmett’s squad room brawl and cut him a break by relegating him to the Records Room instead of requisitioning Sloakes to have him formally reassigned. Afterward, Emmett realized that Ahern hadn’t acted out of charity. He had his own motives for sparing him stiffer measures. By banishing him to the basement, the lieutenant could keep Emmett under his thumb.

  “Haven’t got another set of eyes to spare,” Ahern explained, casually tapping cigarette ash over the ledge. Standing three stories up didn’t bother him. The lieutenant was accustomed to being on top. However, when the division was spread thin, that put him in the pinch, an infrequent position for Ahern. Emmett also had a sneaking suspicion it was the lieutenant who had convinced the feckless Inspector Plout to grant Mose Odett access to the cabdriver, assuming Odett could persuade the crowd to disband. That way the police wouldn’t need to get involved. The strategy had backfired. If Lieutenant Ahern was taking heat for his maneuver, the body of a murdered black boy would fan the flames.

  “This sort of situation requires a gentle touch,” he told Emmett, savoring his delivery, “and you’ve been known for your…discretion.”

  The first and only homicide Emmett ever worked was the shooting of Vernon Young, a twenty-two-year-old from the Scudder Homes projects, who ironed laundry at night for a dry cleaner. Young had been dumping the store’s trash in the alley behind the cleaner’s when he was shot in the back. Obviously, he had been running from somebody. Emmett was assigned to figure out who. The odd man out in the division, he had no partner, no one to show him the ropes, and murder cases didn’t come with training wheels. Emmett was on his own. Once the crime scene photographer had gotten his shots and the coroner had taken the body, Emmett studied the vacant scene to see what Vernon saw: overflowing garbage cans, empty crates from the restaurant next door, and a chain-link fence with dead leaves enmeshed in it, nothing out of the ordinary. It was a discouraging start. Then Emmett noticed a light on inside the dry cleaner’s, so he rapped on the front door.

  The man who appeared at the window was Otis Fossum, and Emmett could instantly tell that he had witnessed Vernon Young’s murder. Fossum was terrified. He was in his forties, thin and lanky, and looked as if he had lived every day twice. At first, he was too rattled to speak. He was steaming collared shirts in a press, mumbling answers to Emmett’s queries, unable to meet his eyes. Emmett tried to earn his trust by telling Fossum about leaving the seminary, making himself vulnerable, careful not to say exactly why he left. He had used the story before. Much as he felt guilty for it, the feeling couldn’t hold a candle to the guilt of actually leaving. His tale convinced Otis to confide what had him frightened.

  Fossum had heard the shot. Through a back window, he had seen two men in the alley. Experience told him one was a cop. His gut said the other was a mobster, giving him double the reason to be scared. Otis guessed that Vernon had stumbled into something he wasn’t supposed to see, and the men had killed him for it. His instincts were correct.

  When Emmett interviewed the patrons and staff from the restaurant next door, one of the diners turned out to be Sal Lucaro, second in command to Ruggiero Caligrassi, a mob boss who ran the entire East Ward and commanded a huge cut of every piece of cargo that came through Port Newark, which alone was a king’s ransom. It was no coincidence that another diner was Frank Giancone, a detective from the Fourth Precinct’s Vice Squad. Their tables were at the opposite ends of the restaurant, however a waitress said she saw the two of them go to the bathroom at about the same time.

  Both men had stuck around the scene, assuming a friendly face from the force would arrive to escort them away, tell them not to worry, and to have a nice night. Emmett wasn’t quite that hospitable. Giancone got anxious and kept fishing for who they knew in common. Emmett simply took his statement, then advised him that he might have to provide his service revolver for comparison if the bullet in the body was identified as a .38. That sent Giancone scurrying for the nearest pay phone. Lucaro was harder to shake. His suit and his fingernails bore the same high sheen, and he had a dimple in his chin that seemed as though it was carved in by an awl. When Emmett asked him if he carried a weapon, Lucaro said, “Good Catholics don’t need to carry guns.”

  “Neither do bad ones,” Emmett had responded, convinced to his core that Sal Lucaro was responsible for killing Vernon Young.

  Vernon’s wallet hadn’t been taken, so robbery wasn’t a motive, and there were no signs of an altercation that would have led to violence. Vernon was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as Otis Fossum had inferred. It turned out Emmett was too.

  What the newspapers ultimately printed about Vernon Young’s death was a single paragraph about him being shot by an unknown assailant and left for dead. Due to an artful smudge of the details, Emmett’s report echoed the article. For him, the irony of being a cop was that it wasn’t that different from being a machinist, like his father. The rewards were for productivity and speed. During his years in Robbery, he stamped out cases, closing them as fast as he could. Most of it was penny-ante stuff,
nothing that involved the mob, so he had never been told to look the other way, not until he arrived in Homicide. On the Vernon Young case, Ahern ordered him to do exactly that.

  Because Fossum valued his life too much to volunteer to view a lineup of Giancone and Lucaro, Emmett was stuck with a case he couldn’t close, a bad precedent for a new Homicide detective to set. Emmett didn’t blame him, but Fossum wasn’t out of the woods. He was a witness. Listing him in the report as such would have signed his death warrant. If the mob didn’t hit him, a cop in Caligrassi’s pocket would. To protect him, Emmett had omitted Otis’s name from the file, referring to him only as “a Negro bystander.” Emmett didn’t want to wind up with another unsolvable case, this one with Otis Fossum’s name on it.

  Emmett had been forced to fudge the Vernon Young report, and that got under his skin. A common practice at the precinct, it ran counter to his Jesuit training and counter to who he was. Beneath his moral protocol, however, pulsed the allegiance Emmett’s father had pounded into him. A union man through and through, his father never sided against his own kind. When the union said “Strike,” his father took to the picket lines, regardless that the family would have to survive on bologna sandwiches and stewed cabbage for weeks at a stretch. Emmett’s father detested the scabs who crossed the picket lines and raised his sons to respect the union as if it were its own religion and never to fight the flow. Boats made waves. People paddled. That was his father’s favorite phrase, and he repeated it so often that Emmett couldn’t help but take it to heart. Fortunately, Emmett didn’t have to cross any line to keep Fossum alive. At least, he thought he didn’t.

  Word of his selective editing circulated in the division. Giancone must have dropped a hint. That was when the pressure started. Ahern had called Emmett into his office, an alcove at the rear of the squad room, and implied that the report was incomplete. He suggested that Emmett redo it. Ahern wouldn’t say explicitly what was missing. He didn’t need to.