Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  She flipped her head back, then ran long, thin fingers through her hair. “I was halfway through the main lobby at the terminal when a black kid, about my age, grabbed my purse and took off. Two steps later, before I could react, he was grabbed by another, older, kid. A man, really. That was Levander. He slapped the guy who took my purse the way you cuff a dog that won’t obey, then came back over to me.

  “Naturally, I was grateful. I never suspected this was a scam Levander repeated as often as he felt he could get into the terminal without being arrested. Most times, the girl took the purse and went on her way, but once in a while someone came through with no idea where she was going or what she would do when she got there. A baby, really, like myself, who’d been beaten by her father and fucked by her uncle so many times she ran into the arms of the first man who’d both beat and fuck her. Such a girl, Moodrow, no matter where she comes to ground, finds Levander Greenwood waiting for her.

  “He took me home for the night. Fed sweet and sour pork to a little country girl who’d never eaten a dish more exotic than a Pizza Hut pizza. Fed cocaine and reefer and a pharmaceutical luude to a girl who never even touched the wine passed at her father’s table.

  “Two weeks later I was on the street. I worked Long Island City most of the time. The johns there always grab you as soon as you get in the car, to see that you’re not a transvestite. It’s all car sex. There’s no hotels.” She paused to gather up the empty glasses as if her confession were no more unusual than an old friend reminiscing on the days of her youth. Moodrow was sitting back in his chair, the glass of bourbon cradled in his lap, like he, too, had all the time in the world. “It took me a long while to realize that I was a prisoner. At first I was high all the time. High on dope mostly, though we smoked joints as casually as you’d smoke a cigarette and carried little pill boxes filled with Seconal and black beauties. Ups and downs, whichever way you needed to go. I thought it was heaven and as for the sex…we got off by despising the pitiful johns, so fucked up they bought the flesh of women who felt absolutely nothing for them.

  “I think I probably could have gone on like that for a good ten years if Levander hadn’t decided to make me his permanent woman. He never explained why he did it; he never said, for instance, that he loved me or he was jealous of other men. One day, he simply announced that I was to live with him and not to sleep with anyone else. Ever. Three months after that he told me that we were going to be married and I was standing next to him, while a Baptist minister in a storefront church in Brownsville mumbled some bullshit about ‘do you take this man’ when I first realized that, as far as Levander Greenwood was concerned, I was a prisoner for life.

  “But, fuck it, baby. I was still high all the time. So high that somehow, even though we rarely had sex, Levander managed to knock me up without my seeing it coming. I didn’t realize anything was wrong until my stomach was near the size of a watermelon. Levander was pleased as punch. He bragged to all his friends about what a great father he was going to be and just to prove his point, he cut me off from all drugs for the last month of my pregnancy.

  “By the time Lee arrived, somehow healthy, in spite of my losing twenty pounds in two weeks, I knew I had to leave. I knew I was a human being in spite of my life up until that point. When they put Lee on my belly, I looked down at his curly wet hair and his closed eyes and my heart fell out of my chest. There’s no way to explain that feeling to someone who’s never felt it or to explain what it feels like to watch your child being beaten by a crazed animal named Levander Greenwood.

  “You see, I made the mistake of telling Levander that I wanted to leave. Lee was about three months old and I was already pregnant with Jeanette. I should have known better. I’d been beaten by him and seen him beat other women many times, but I had some fantasy of living in the neighborhood. I was only eighteen, and despite three years of Levander, still naive in the ways of predation. Levander not only gave me a good ‘whippin,’ he took away all my money. I was given only enough to perform specific tasks and was expected to produce receipts.

  “Then he went after Lee. He said that I loved the ‘little rat’ more than him. He complained that Lee cried too much. How could he not cry when the man who beat him nearly everyday started screaming at him? I was frantic. Sometimes I put myself between them. Sometimes I jumped on Levander’s back. But the result was always the same. The result was the sharp crack of his palm on Lee’s face. Or his fists on my ribs.”

  Slowly, without making a great show of it and with no embarrassment whatsoever, she pulled the bottom of her blouse from her skirt and lifted it to reveal a row of greenish-purple bruises that ran from her lower ribs to her armpit.

  “When Jeanette was a year old, Judge Sidney Weinstein dealt Levander five to ten for manslaughter. A plea bargain, by the way. Down from second degree murder. Believe it or not, I thought I was free. The day they convicted him, I went to the welfare offices near City Hall and spoke to Adrienne Epstein from ‘Battered Women.’ She got me into a residential treatment program on Staten Island where I stayed with fifty women who’d all been through the same thing. By the way, that was the most depressing part of the deal, admitting that what happened to me was common. That my suffering wasn’t special.

  “I stayed there for six months, then I came back to this apartment. I had never lived alone before, never had to take care of myself, but I discovered that I thrived on freedom. I found my way into the office of a doctor friend of Adrienne’s and learned the Latin words, the names of the instruments, how to wheedle money out of patients who pleaded poverty, even how to type. The kids went to day care in the mornings and to Granny Louise and Auntie Marlee in the evenings when I worked late. I had no desire for sex or even for a relationship. My idea of fulfillment was getting my high school diploma. Of starting classes at Manhattan Community College. Of taking one lousy, three-credit anthropology course that turned out to be about as exciting as locking myself in a closet for six hours a week.

  “Paradise, right? To be suddenly given a life after twenty years of dreaming … if you’ve never been there, you’ll never know. Anyway, six years later Levander Greenwood came out of prison. He was calling himself Kubla Khan, then, after the character in the poem and two days after they let him out, he showed up to reclaim his kingdom.

  “I fought.” Her voice dropped now, deepened as she came to the point. Moodrow was sitting upright, his shoulders hunched forward as if protecting her. Or claiming her. “Naturally, I fought. The thought of letting him abuse my children panicked me. I was not the same woman anymore. I had the police take him out of the house and he came back and beat me up. I went to court and got an order barring him from coming within one hundred yards of me or my children and he came back and beat me. I had him arrested and they tried to violate his parole. He was inside for a month and the judge told him if he harassed me, he’d do another three years.

  “Two days after his release, I found him in the apartment after I picked up the kids. He’d jimmied the window gate and busted open the window to get inside. He explained himself very clearly. ‘See what I’m gonna do is teach you about fuckin’ with me.’ He took Jeanette by the hand and dragged her into the bathroom. By this time, both the children were crying and I was begging him not to hurt them, but he just laughed and explained how he’d been too easy with us. Now he was going to show us the ‘hard edge of his will’ in such a way that we wouldn’t ever doubt him again.

  “He filled the tub with hot water; it was midsummer and the landlord was sending it up scalding hot. Levander sat on the edge of the tub and let the steam boil around his face. I remember sunlight pouring through the leaded glass window and lighting up the beads of sweat on his neck. From somewhere in the distance, I heard my own voice. I was still pleading and Levander was still ignoring me. When he put Jeanette’s hand in the water I thought I would go mad.

  “He held her hand under the water for a long time. I couldn’t count it. A second seemed like an hour, like there was n
o time at all, then somehow it was over. He told me, ‘Put these kids to bed, then come in your room. I’ll be waitin’ for you. And don’t you ever disrespect me again or else the little bitch’ll think this was her Saturday night bath.’

  “Aren’t I entitled to a life? Doesn’t the Constitution say I have a right to have a life? Don’t my children have a right to their lives? Do we have to run and hide? Where do you run when you never have an extra dime? When you have to work fifty hours a week to pay the rent? But I’m still entitled to a life. It’s my right.”

  She paused, her eyes riveted to Moodrow’s. Her face was strained, now, her eyes narrow. “How many murders is he wanted for? I saw his face on the news tonight and the newsman was talking about a dead cop. When you take him, you can do anything you want and nobody will give a shit about it.”

  Moodrow reached out, as if to cover her mouth, but she was quicker. She laid her hand on his and gently pushed it down. “Kill him, Moodrow. It’s your job to protect the innocent, and even if I’m a whore and a junkie, the children will never be free as long as he’s alive. Never.

  “I’ve already tried the ‘right’ way. I went to the cops and I went to the judge and they couldn’t protect me. What’s next?” She got up abruptly, walked to a cabinet laying against the wall and took out a small, automatic pistol. “I could shoot him, Moodrow. I’ve dreamed it a thousand times. But if I do, the cops—maybe you, eh?—will have to arrest me. The district attorney will have to move for an indictment. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Battered women are ‘in’ these days. Maybe I’ll find a good lawyer who’ll represent me for the publicity and a good jury to find me innocent. And then, after two years of hell, my children, if the state lets me keep them, can grow up knowing I blew their father away, a little added burden for two zebras coming up in New York. No, you’re the one, Moodrow. You have to see that it gets done. You have to protect us.”

  She stopped cold then and the room filled with tension. Moodrow stood up, as if he was in a hurry to get somewhere, then realized he had no place to go and sat back down. He was smart enough to keep his mouth shut, but Tilley couldn’t resist stepping in. Not that he wasn’t moved by what she’d said. The urge to protect her was as powerful as the physical attraction a few moments earlier. It’s just that the answer seemed so obvious. “You know if he’s taken alive, he’s gonna get convicted of first degree murder? You know that, right? That’s for killing a cop. He’ll have to do forty years, minimum.”

  She turned to him for the first time and when she spoke, her voice was patient, gentle. “I’ll never be safe as long as he’s alive,” she said. “He’ll never stop trying to get out and if he gets out he’ll come back to me. I’ll never go through a day knowing we’re safe. And there’s something else I haven’t told you yet. When Levander came by last week, he brought a man with him. I doubt very much if he was a friend.”

  Like slapstick comedians doing a doubletake, Moodrow and Tilley sat bolt upright in their chairs. The whole visit had been full of surprises, but this was the most unexpected of all. It put her request on a whole other level and all three of them knew it.

  “If I give you the name, you’ll go after him and Levander will hear about it. He’ll know I gave it to you and he’ll come back. Well, I won’t be here, Moodrow. I’m going to stay with a friend in Washington Heights, but I can’t live there forever. I have to work. I have to go about the business of earning my life. I have to know that when the smoke clears, I’ll be free forever.”

  “You got a lot of nerve, Rosie. You’re asking me to commit a murder. Asking me in front of a witness.”

  “You told me you trusted him,” she replied evenly. “And I wanted someone else to hear you promise.”

  “I haven’t promised.”

  “Yet. My bags are already packed.” She smiled. “Why bullshit, Moodrow? Huh? Why bullshit? Levander isn’t the most popular fellow on the Lower East Side these days. The man he was with had to be some kind of a partner. He stood by the window the whole time Levander was here. Watched Levander beat me up without blinking an eye. For a change, Levander didn’t want sex. He wanted money and I didn’t have enough. Levander’s smoking crack, now, and he’s insane.”

  Her assessment of the investigation was virtually identical to that of the two cops. Levander’s partner would be the map to the hidden treasure.

  “How do you want me to do it? You want me to do it in front of witnesses? You think a cop can’t be indicted? Maybe I should kill the two hundred other cops that’ll probably be there when we take him, so no one can testify against me.”

  Suddenly, Rose Carillo showed her anger for the first time. The muscles in her cheeks balled up and Tilley caught a glimpse of her determination. It was so close to that of Louise Greenwood, it shocked him. “Don’t fuck me around, Moodrow. You try to arrange it so that you’ll take him alone. That’s how you wanna do it anyway. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t. I’ll have to hope you can keep him in a cage, but if it does work, I’ll have a life for the first time. The kind of life that you take for granted.” She stopped then. Stopped to catch her breath, then sat back in her chair. “What’s the story, Moodrow? You in or out?”

  A huge, wolfish smile. An angry smile, palms turned up. “I’m in, Rosie. Naturally, I’m in.”

  6

  MOODROW LEFT ROSE CARILLO’S apartment at a dead run, Jim Tilley trailing behind. Moodrow was obviously angry, but there was something else beyond that. By his own standards, Moodrow had compromised himself by promising both to keep Greenwood alive and to kill him. According to “Moodrow’s Law,” each woman was entitled to the fulfillment of the deal he’d made with her. Add to this his agreeing to commit a homicide (whether he meant it or not) in front of a rookie detective he’d known for twenty-four hours and you have the picture of Don Moodrow pounding down the stairs (waterbugs be damned) and into the street. Rose had named Levander’s associate, then given Moodrow her new address in Washington Heights. If her ex-husband was looking for her, she wanted to know about it.

  The name she gave them, Peter Katjcic, belonged to a white biker, a founding member of a dealing gang called Satan’s Gentlemen. Unlike more notorious outlaw gangs that specialized in greasy, denim cutaways, the Gentlemen wore leather jumpsuits when the weather was cool enough, leather pants and matching armless jackets over white, silk shirts when it was hot. Their motorcycles, far from the stripped down behemoths favored by outlaw bikers, were loaded with every conceivable accessory. Wide cowlings in front held twin stereo speakers, dual headlights, tachometers, air vents (on a motorcycle!) and enough amber lights for a glitter-crazed cowboy in a customized ten-wheeler. Not that the backs of the bikes had been neglected. A truck mounted above fiberglass saddlebags supported two more stereo speakers, dual antennas and chrome racks. Every inch was encrusted with red lights and trimmed with chrome strips that accented more chrome in the dual exhausts, sweeping engine guards, shock absorbers and spoke wheels. These motorcycles, of course, were always spotless, as were their riders. The whole effort was to stand apart from their outlaw brothers, the same outlaws with whom they traded homebrewed methamphetamine (called crank) on an almost daily basis.

  Tilley knew none of this, of course, as he trotted behind Moodrow. It was enough just to keep up with him. Moodrow didn’t speak a word until the two of them were in the car (Moodrow on the driver’s side) and started moving. Then he finally muttered, “Okay, basketballs, you’re gonna get your chance now.”

  “You talking to me?” Tilley may have resented the calculating, controlled Moodrow, but he was nevertheless infinitely preferable to the maniac who swept onto Avenue C, tires screaming. Moodrow had the red bubble cupped to the roof of the Plymouth and he jerked the sedan around the buses and the parked trucks as if somehow Katjcic knew they were coming. They roared onto 4th Street, barely cleared a double-parked car (a Spanish kid loading a stereo into the trunk crossed himself as the Plymouth tore by) and turned abruptly into a vacant lot next to a long-ago burnt-out
tenement. Behind the building, in a locked, fenced, impromptu parking lot, Satan’s Gentlemen kept their motorcycles. In spite of the shadows in the courtyard, they glowed as if every square inch of paint, each spoke, even the black leather seats had been polished and repolished a moment before the two cops arrived.

  “What the fuck is this?” Jim Tilley might as well have tried to communicate by smoke signals for all the impression his question made on Moodrow, who nosed the Plymouth forward until it was touching the gate, feathered the gas pedal until the lock gave, then coasted to a stop in the backyard. Tilley could feel the eyes behind the boarded-up windows. If he had been at a drive-in with his high school sweetheart, this is where he would have made his move.

  “That’s the entrance to the club.” Moodrow pointed to a black, windowless door set five or six steps below ground level. “The first person comes out of that door, you hit him. Don’t wait. Don’t let ’em think even for one second that you’re weighing your decision.” He walked back to the trunk of the car, opened it, took out two aluminum baseball bats and handed one to Tilley. “Hit him with this.”

  “You’re crazy, Moodrow. You’re out of your fucking mind. I’m not gonna jump through your hoops. No way.”

  Moodrow looked into his partner’s eyes for a moment, then nearly smiled. “You better do it, Jimmy. Cause if you don’t, we’re gonna get our asses kicked. Guaranteed.” He crossed to the row of parked motorcycles. The bat, raised high above his head, looked as small as a nightstick in the hand of an ordinary policeman and he brought it down with enough force to completely justify Tilley’s sense of being the sacrifice in a horror movie. It crashed into the cowling of a huge Kawasaki, cracking the plastic, smashing the dual headlights and the side mirror, making that singing sound aluminum bats make when they strike a baseball, like a tuning fork gone berserk. Then he turned to his partner with a relieved grin on his face.