Color of Justice

by Gary Hardwick

  He was mad and Danny knew that he was in an indefensible position. Even though it had all turned out okay, they had to go out again tomorrow, and the next day, and Erik was not pleased about that.

  “I’m new at this,” Danny said. “You know that.” It was a lame-ass excuse and he regretted it as soon as he’d said it. He’d been a cop too long to have that be a legitimate excuse.

  “Look, I’m just upset now, man. So, don’t talk to me for a while.”

  “How long?” asked Danny.

  “You still talkin’, dammit,” said Erik.

  Erik walked away and Danny didn’t try to stop him. His partner was totally right. Danny had had no right to force him to follow into that situation. Even though they might have saved a life, Danny had put others in peril. What Danny did was heroic, but to your partner, it was screwed up. Danny was much more reckless than Erik, and they were still getting used to one another.

  Danny went out the front door into the night. He breathed in the cool air, and tried to clear his head. Erik was on a cell phone, probably talking to his wife and kids. Now Danny really felt like shit.

  Danny watched as they loaded two of the killers into a squad car. The leader was put into a different car so they could get conflicting stories if anyone talked. Danny sighed as he realized that he’d have to spend all the next morning filing reports on the incident.

  Erik finished his call and gave Danny a look that was not nearly as angry as he had expected. They didn’t speak, but Danny could tell his partner had already started to forgive him.

  Glancing up into the dark sky at the hanging half-moon, Danny imagined the other part of it from its visible half. The stark white divided against the blackness of the eclipsed part seemed to fill the night sky. He broke away from the vision and the obvious thoughts in his head. Then he went back to his job, happy that no one had been killed this night.

  3

  WHEN LUCY FELL

  There’s an old joke that God invented liquor so the Irish couldn’t take over the world. This would have been true in Danny’s family many years ago. His father, Robert Thomas Cavanaugh, was a hard-drinking cop with a fiery temper and little concern for his family. Danny had inherited his father’s strength, but his temper had come along with it, a familial mixed blessing.

  These were the things Danny thought of as he raised his hand to knock on the door of his parents’ house on the east side of Detroit. The neighborhood was nice, having fought off encroaching criminality over the last ten years. Being home brought back memories, some great, others awful. Danny felt his gut tighten as he heard someone walking toward the door.

  Robert Cavanaugh opened the door and glanced up at his son. Robert was going on sixty-five and was slowing down. He’d developed a bad habit of crouching when he stood, and the last few times Danny had been by, he was always in his pajamas, as was the case today. Still, Danny saw the handsome, straight-arrow cop with the square jaw and reddish hair who used to strut around as if nothing could touch him.

  Danny remembered when his father had taken him to his new school that first day so long ago. He’d glanced up at him and his father’s head had been framed by the morning light of the sun, creeping around the edges of his policeman’s cap, almost godlike. That was always Danny’s picture of what it meant to be a cop, something powerful, beautiful, and mysterious.

  Robert pulled his plaid green robe around him, mumbled something like a hello, then walked off. Danny followed him inside.

  “Wha’sup?” Danny asked.

  “You don’t have to come over every day,” said Robert. His Irish accent was just barely detectable. It was a sign that he was upset when you could discern it in his voice.

  “I worry,” said Danny. “You live alone now.”

  “I can take care of myself,” said Robert. He produced a .38 special from under his robe, then just as quickly, it was gone.

  Robert moved into the kitchen. Danny went after him for a few steps, then stopped and looked at the pictures in the room. His mother’s face stared at him from all directions.

  Lucy Cavanaugh had died about a half year ago. She’d taken a bad fall down the stairs, struck her head, and never woke up. It had hit his father hard. Robert seemed to age twenty years inside of a month. He’d dropped twenty pounds and his disposition was as bad as it could be, not that it had ever been all that good to begin with.

  Danny had been devastated, too. He and his mother had not gotten along very well and she’d passed before he could make it better. Since her death, he’d been haunted by her demise, dreaming of her falling to her end with him powerless to do anything.

  Danny’s parents had been having a rough go of it before the accident. They argued about everything and didn’t speak for days at a time. He could never figure out how they could be married for four decades and still have problems. His parents had just had a fight when Lucy fell down the staircase. Now she was gone, and neither Danny nor his father could ever set things right with her.

  Danny’s mother had never approved of his life. He was unmarried and living in sin with a woman, a black one at that. Lucy didn’t say much about Vinny’s color, but Danny knew it bothered her as it did most people. On the other hand, Robert, for all of his flaws, didn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body, a rare thing for a cop.

  Danny walked past the long staircase and tried not to think of his mother tumbling down them. He went into the kitchen and found Robert Cavanaugh sitting at the table eating a breakfast of leftover pasta and orange juice.

  He wanted to say so much to his father, but every time he tried to talk about Lucy dying, Robert clammed up, becoming sad and angry. Maybe it was better not to talk about it, he thought. The two men had only each other. There was Danny’s brother, but the family had dropped contact with him years ago. No one tried to find him for the funeral. Hell, no one even knew if he was still alive.

  Danny wanted to discuss it. His mother’s death bothered him greatly, and it was more than the normal reason. There was something not right about it, something that tingled the police instincts he’d inherited from his father.

  “I’ve been thinking about Ma lately,” said Danny.

  Robert didn’t respond. He looked over his plate at Danny with an annoyed expression.

  “I’ve been having this dream about how she died.” Danny knew he was treading on dangerous ground, but he’d never gotten anywhere with Robert by pussyfooting around.

  “You know how she died. We all know, Danny,” said Robert pointedly. “So what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t know if what the medical examiner said was right, you know—”

  Robert’s face contorted into mild anger. “It’s too early for that shit,” snapped Robert. “For God’s sake can’t you ever leave it alone! Fuck, just fuck it!” Robert grabbed his juice and stomped off, mumbling.

  Danny listened as his father stomped-cursed his way into the other room. He poured himself a glass of orange juice and said nothing more. He just sat for a while, waiting. Then when he felt Robert had calmed down enough, he went into the living room. He took a moment, watching his father, his mind flooding with memory. Danny kissed his father on the top of the head and headed out, leaving the pain and memory of his mother behind.

  “How are you feeling today, Danny?” asked the therapist.

  “I’m cool,” said Danny. He settled into the big leather chair and let it envelop him.

  The therapist was Dr. Donald Gordon. He was the department psychologist and a former detective. A white man of about forty or so, he had a medium build and was beginning to lose his salt-and-pepper hair.

  On Gordon’s desk was a picture of him and his wife of fifteen years, Patty, and their daughters. When he got his degree, he’d left the department after ten years to be a shrink, but he’d been drawn right back into the game a few years later.

  “So what’s on your mind?” asked Gordon.

  “I visited my father again today,” said Danny. “He still won’t tal
k about it.”

  “How does that make you feel?” asked Gordon.

  “It’s fucked up.”

  “You said that you had questions about your mother’s death, that everything didn’t fit. You still feel that way?”

  “I’m a cop. Nothing ever fits for us.” Danny was trying to get away from the discussion, but Gordon was right. The death of his mother was something he thought about each day. Lucy had descended those stairs thousands of times and never had she slipped. Sure she was old, but she was in good shape. He didn’t like to think about it because if she didn’t slip and fall, then the alternative was too terrible to imagine.

  “I only bring it up,” said Gordon, “because you always do at some point. Let’s see if we can get to the bottom of it this time.”

  Danny had successfully completed an anger management course, but it was strongly suggested that he see the department shrink in order to solidify his hold on a gold shield. Danny’s history of overzealous law enforcement was not a help to his career. These days, a violent white cop in a black city like Detroit was a lightning rod for trouble of all kinds.

  Danny didn’t like the idea of seeing a shrink. Crazy. It was an old notion, but one that hung on in the blue-collar world he lived in. A man took care of his own problems, and he certainly didn’t go to a doctor and whine about them. And yet Danny was finding comfort in his weekly visits. Gordon was laid-back and knew the police game well enough never to need explanation. It was like having another partner, or at least that’s what he kept telling himself.

  “Okay, Doc,” said Danny. “If my mother didn’t fall down those stairs then my father…he was the only other person there. They had been having trouble, fighting a lot.”

  “Your father, Robert, the cop?” Gordon said with emphasis.

  “Yeah, he’d know how to do something like that.”

  “Like what?” asked Gordon. “Say the words, Danny. It’s the first step to dealing with this.”

  “He’d know how to kill someone and make it look like an accident,” said Danny with a hint of sadness in his voice.

  “Do you think he did it?”

  Danny thought long about his father. Robert Cavanaugh was a hard man, tough and uncompromising. He’d shot two men during his tenure as a cop—one of them died. Yes, he could do it, but why was the question.

  “I don’t know,” said Danny. “I’m just a little fucked up about it, you know. My mother and me wasn’t all that close.”

  “And you never got closure?”

  “No,” said Danny, laughing a little. “We never seem to get that closure shit down in my family.”

  “Maybe thinking your father did something bad is just your own guilt about the accident, trying to blame someone else.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to my father. It’s just that…he was supposed to take care of her. He didn’t. That’s all.”

  “Then you have to talk with your father about it at some point,” said Gordon.

  “I try,” said Danny. “My old man just won’t let me go there. If I push, he’ll probably try to kick my ass.” Danny laughed a little.

  “I try to get people to take action to solve their problems,” said Gordon. “If you won’t do anything about this then you have to stop punishing yourself with all these unanswered questions.”

  “Shit or get my ass off the pot, huh?”

  “That would be another way of saying it, yes.”

  “Then let’s forget about it,” said Danny. “I’ll just let it all go.”

  Gordon made a few notes in a book he always kept nearby. Danny watched him and knew that he’d lied about letting it go. He was playing out the scene in his head again. He saw his mother come out of the bathroom and walk to the stairs. He saw her lose her footing and tumble. He watched as she hit the bottom of the landing, twisting her neck, her head slamming into the floor. He saw his father running feebly after he tried to stop her fall, almost falling himself.

  “I want to get back to why you came here,” said Gordon. His voice jolted Danny back into reality.

  “Why I came?” asked Danny.

  “Well, we’ve been here for a long time trying to get to the root of your problems with aggression. We got to a point where we decided that it had something to do with growing up in an all-black neighborhood. Then your mother passed and we got sidetracked.”

  “I guess we did. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Black people,” said Gordon.

  “What about them?” asked Danny.

  “You think being an outcast made you overly aggressive?”

  “No,” said Danny. “It’s not like that. I was accepted eventually, it’s more like…” He stopped a moment to collect his thoughts on this. These sessions were helping, but they challenged him mentally. He was good at being a cop, but talking about his feelings was crippling. “Black people are sick.”

  Gordon’s eyebrows raised. “How so?”

  “Not sick like physically,” said Danny. “They’re sick in the heart, down where we can’t see it, can’t touch it, down where if you want to help, you’d better have a damned good reason for asking, or it might be your ass.”

  “Personal things?”

  “Yeah, that’s it, personal.”

  “Why are you so comfortable talking about this?” asked Gordon. “I mean, I’m a white guy and it makes me nervous to analyze black people in such a generalizing way.”

  “But I’m not a white guy,” said Danny casually. “That’s what I’m saying. I mean, not really. I have that sickness in my heart, too. So, I’m really talking about myself.”

  Danny had lived around black people since he was a kid. His father, Robert Cavanaugh, was a city cop, so the family had to live in Detroit because of the residency requirement. All his life, Danny had lived in the hardness of the inner city, in the heart of blackness. He knew all too well what he was talking about.

  “So, you feel your anger comes from this sickness?” asked Gordon.

  “Yeah. Only it’s worse because of what I see in the mirror.”

  Danny grew up on the east side of Detroit, in a ghetto fortress bounded by Six Mile, Dequindre, Conant, and a hole that became the Davison Freeway. He was forced to accept the ways of black people. He learned the rhythm of life, the philosophy and attitudes of the people, which manifested themselves in everything from a discussion of global politics to the proper way to cook a slab of ribs.

  Danny had caught a lot of shit for this early on. Black people thought he mocked them, trying to have the best of blackness without the terrible burden. Whites thought quite simply that he was crazy, a crazy-ass white boy trying to be something he wasn’t. But over time, people noticed it less and less.

  “You certainly don’t sound like a white guy,” said Gordon.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “I hear that all the time. But I don’t understand that shit. I sound how I sound, you know.”

  “So why do you think you had such a problem with your temper?” asked Gordon. “You think you have some kind of rage?”

  “Not like the brothers have,” said Danny. “I’m not mad because I’ve been treated like shit by a whole country.”

  Danny didn’t think a guy like Gordon could understand how black people took their pain and pushed it into a deep place where it stayed just behind every thought, perception, hope, and fear. And how you did this until it became an inseparable part of you, like a psychological shadow cast by the cold, fucked-up light of the world. And there in the bosom of your deepest humanity, it became a fire, a power that propelled you over the obstacles of life and allowed you to find peace and joy even as you suffered. Gordon wouldn’t understand how this was what it meant when they say black people have soul.

  “How did you feel when all the other white families left your neighborhood?” asked Gordon.

  “Didn’t think much of it at first. Families came and went all the time. Then I realized that I was the only one left, the only white boy at everything. Man, I got chase
d, beat up, and teased.”

  “And what about your parents? Your father?”

  “He was drinking a lot back then. Fighting with my mother and shit, you know.”

  “Did that make you upset?”

  “Made me sad mostly,” said Danny. “Sad that we couldn’t have a normal life. But I had a good time as a kid. It wasn’t always cool to be the only white guy, but after a while the kids didn’t give a shit. See, there’s this thing in the city where everybody recognizes that we’re all fucked, so it don’t matter if your daddy’s black and out of work, or white and a drunk. Fucked is fucked.”

  “And yesterday when you approached the killer with the Uzi, were you angry then? Did you want to shoot him?”

  “Yeah, I did,” said Danny. “In the old days, I would have waited for him to move, then fired. But now, I’m…” Danny became quiet for a moment, looking for the right words. “I’m trying to be better.”

  “So how did your parents feel about living in that neighborhood?”

  “My mother hated it. My old man, well, he thinks black people are strong. He wanted me to be strong, too, that’s why he put me in that school.”

  “And your brother?” asked Gordon.

  “Shoot, I’m sure he didn’t care. He was pretty much out of the house by that time.”

  Gordon took a moment, thinking. Danny had already picked up on this move by the doctor. It meant he had a hard question to ask him and was looking for the right words.

  “You do understand that you are not black?” asked Gordon.

  “I understand that a man is more than his color,” said Danny. “That it’s what’s in his heart that makes all the difference. See, everybody’s always talkin’ ’bout how we all the same underneath, love your brother and shit, but don’t nobody really believe it, nobody but me.”

  Danny had evaded the question somewhat, but Gordon did not push. Danny noticed that Gordon never pressed the point. Danny was a complex man who had been hammered by stark cultural differences at an early age and was still trying to deal with what it all meant. He guessed that the doctor understood this.