The first thing I notice about Richard Silver is that he’s a lot bigger than he looked on TV. The image I’d always had of him was as a skinny guy with his tie loosened and a jacket slung over his shoulder, cooling down the streets over the long, hot summers. It isn’t just that he’s gotten a bit of a paunch since then. He has massive forearms like a wrestler’s beneath his tailored suit.
“Since you mention it, perhaps my language was inappropriate with the young man,” he says. “Shall I go out there and apologize?”
I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. The small birthmark above his right eyebrow makes it look like the brow is perpetually raised in skepticism. A little unnerving, but probably very effective in negotiations across a conference table.
“Why don’t you have a seat?” I ask.
He gets a faraway, annoyed look, like a fly is buzzing in his ear. “This gonna take long? I got other appointments.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, pointing to the empty chair.
Silver walks around the chair twice, surveying it as though he’s considering buying it. Then he stops and glances back at me with his head cocked and a half smile. Very, very slowly he begins to lower himself into the chair. Finally sitting down, but only on his own terms.
“So what do you want from me?” he asks brusquely.
Beautiful. For six weeks, I’ve been writing letters and leaving messages asking him just to keep his appointment with me. Almost anybody else would get hauled back in front of the judge for acting this way. Instead, he’s sitting here like he’s on the shoeshine throne and I’m on the footstool.
“Keep your shirt on,” I tell him as I look for the papers I put under my desk when I thought Darryl King was coming.
I grew up thinking Richard Silver was a hero. As a city councilman in the 1960s, he was known in the city’s poorest communities as “the Enabler.” If the community needed garbage trucks or youth programs, he enabled them. I remember my fourth-grade social studies teacher telling us that he prevented the city from burning down in the riots and that we all owed him a debt.
But he changed. First he withdrew his support for a controversial housing project that would’ve brought low-income people into a middle-class part of Brooklyn. There was a term in Congress and then he left government for a brief whirl through the nightclub business in the late seventies. He wound up opening a law practice, where his main clients were corporations and developers looking for big city contracts. The press celebrated his million-dollar deals and he became a fixture at society dinner parties. Then he suddenly fell from grace. Convicted of a crime so surprising and tawdry that people who’d once clamored to sit next to him denied having ever laid eyes on him. His friend and partner in the scheme, Jimmy Rose, once a great political reformer himself, died of cancer a short time later.
So now I figure I ought to treat Silver the way I’d treat any other client in off the street. I get out my worksheet and ask for a birth date and current address. Silver hesitates when I get to the marital status question. “You better put that I’m still married, okay?”
On a first visit I wouldn’t give another client a hard time on that, so I let it go. “What do you do for a living now?” I ask.
“I’m a consultant.”
“What does that mean?”
“I consult,” he says, loosening his tie. “Y’know. People come to me with ideas. I say, ‘This is great’ or ‘Hey, this stinks.’”
“They pay you a lot of money for this?”
“Well, what do you call a lot of money?” he says, giving me the full eyebrow effect.
He’s almost daring me to get into a fight with him. I start squeezing the blob of Silly Putty I keep in the pocket of my windbreaker for just such occasions.
“So who consults you?” I ask.
“Private companies.” He gives the picture of the beach landscape a searching look, like his client list is on it.
Before he can explain, I get distracted by some whispering out in the hall. A couple of the probation officers from next door, probably, with their ears to the wall. It figures everyone in the office would get excited about a big deal like him coming in. It’s like the first Cadillac rolling into a poor neighborhood.
I go over to the wall and bang on it. “Beat it!” I yell. “Don’t you have work?”
“Why don’t you sell tickets while you’re at it?” Silver says with a smile as they scurry away.
I pick up my pen and papers. “What was I saying?”
“Present employment, stuff like that,” Silver reminds me, peeking at his gold Rolex.
“I’ll get back to that,” I say, holding the pen’s cap in my mouth while I write Silver’s name on top of a sheet of paper. “Part of your sentence is two thousand hours community service …”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”
I check a document on my desk. “My concern,” I say, “is that you perform that community service and you do not associate with individuals who were involved in your original offense.”
He gets a dark, brooding expression. “Jimmy Rose has been dead a year. What do you want me to do? Raise him from the grave so I can ignore him?”
“I’m just doing my job,” I say sharply. “Maybe if you’d returned my phone calls or letters, we wouldn’t have to go through all this and I wouldn’t be looking at a potential violation.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. He just stares at me. There’s something strong and a little scary in his gaze. Like he’s done some truly merciless things in his life and hasn’t wasted a lot of time worrying about them. I can’t afford to look away. It’s like an encounter with a wild animal: If you let him see your fear, you’re dead. A half minute crawls by.
“You were a lawyer,” I say evenly. “You know how it works. If you don’t want to cooperate, I have to go back to the judge and tell him you’re violating the terms of your probation and he should consider giving you a stiffer sentence.”
Silver looks like he’s about to start laughing. “Oh that is such bullshit,” he says. “Whaddya think? They’re gonna send me to jail because I didn’t talk to you?”
“Maybe not, but I can run you up some legal bills trying.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Silver leans forward in his chair so he’s right in my face. He has creases and marks I didn’t notice from a few feet away. A deep scar runs from the edge of his chin to the top of his throat. It’s as if his face has kept a record of all things he managed to keep out of his written file.
In what first seems like a fatherly gesture, he reaches over and puts his hand on my arm. Then his fingers start to dig into the tendons just above my elbow, and the pain makes me wince.
“All right, you wanna play hardball,” he says in a surly voice. “Fine. I been out of government a while, but I still know people. And they know people you work for. So I’d just watch it.”
I peel his fingers off my arm and give him a long hard look. “Oh yeah?” I say. “Go ahead. Your friends can do whatever they want. It doesn’t matter. I’m already a probation officer. I can’t go any lower than that.”
A long silence passes. Silver gives me a wary look, like he’s seeing me for the first time. The current in the air has subtly changed direction. Both of us move our chairs back a little.
“What the hell is that?” he says suddenly.
“What?”
“That.” He points to the blackboard, where the man I drew for Ricky is still sucking on his turnstile.
“It’s a visual aid,” I say sheepishly.
“A visual aid? It looks like homosexual pornography.”
“Well, that’s because you don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Oh okay … What are you doing here?” he says like a card shark looking for an angle.
“Come on. I’m not gonna play games.”
“Who’s playing games? I’m interested.” His manner has changed in the last few seconds. He’s smiling now and sounding solicitous. “You’re
asking me a lot of questions about my personal life. Aren’t I entitled to know something?”
He cuts me off before I can protest. “You embarrassed?”
“No, I’m not embarrassed,” I say, pushing my fingers into the Silly Putty.
“So what kind of accent is that, anyway? You from Astoria or something?”
I give the ceiling a thoughtful look, but I can’t think of a reason not to answer. “Flushing,” I mutter. Most people can’t even tell I’m from Queens.
“I’m from East Elmhurst myself,” Silver tells me. “What street did you grow up on?”
“Blossom Avenue.”
There’s something a little disarming about the way he’s looking at me. “Flushing High School?” he asks.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I say, putting up my hand to redirect the flow of conversation.
“We used to play you in football. It was a good team.”
“Yeah, I guess …”
“You go home much?”
“Sometimes,” I say, trying to get back on track. “Anyway …”
“Your name’s Baum, right?” he says, closing one eye in concentration. “I knew a guy named Baum once. Maybe he’s related to you. What does your dad do?”
My fingers begin molding the Silly Putty into the shape of brass knuckles. “Never mind,” I say quietly.
Silver’s eyes widen a little. “What’re you so touchy about? Something the matter with your dad?”
That’s the thing about a guy like Silver. He just works on you until he finds your sore spot. “Nothing’s the matter with my dad.” I light a cigarette. “We’re talking about you anyway.”
“Of course,” Silver says, nodding seriously. “Community service. Is he in jail or something, your father?”
I blow a gust of smoke out of the side of my mouth. “Cut it out,” I tell him.
“Okay. I just like to know who I’m dealing with, that’s all.” He leans his head back and smiles slightly, obviously filing away the information for another day. “You know who you remind me of?” he says, turning to look at the small Dylan poster on my wall. “Some of the young guys we used to have doing the community action programs in the sixties. Good people. Did terrific work.”
“Is that so?” I say, starting to take notes. While I write down something about what a manipulative prick Silver is, I think about how it would’ve been nice to know more about that era.
“Yeah,” he says, crossing his legs. “Yeah, those were great programs. The antipoverty councils, the rehabilitation centers. A lot of young guys just like you running them …”
“Yeah?”
“Sure … too bad we had to cut all their funding and kick them all out on the street …” He grins and rocks back in his chair. A nice shot, I have to admit. Just his little reminder that he once held the strings over guys like me.
“Well, Richard, we’ve come a long way since then,” I say, putting my glasses back on. “So why don’t I just go over the conditions of your probation with you once before you go?”
5
“AWWWWWWW, GET BUSY! Get busy! Get busy! Get busy!”
That fucking song again. All summer long it’d been driving Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough nuts. Everywhere he went he heard it. In the tenement stairwells, the school courtyards, and outside, on the street corners. You couldn’t get away from it. Not even here, in the detective bureau of the 25th Precinct. Some yo-yo turned on the radio and there it was again. The ceaseless mechanical hip-hop beat, the screeching sound like faulty windshield wipers in the background, and the frantic voice shouting over and over again: “Get busy! Get busy! Get busy!”
Now he was never going to get any work done. He sat with his two meaty arms suspended over the small old manual typewriter, like he was about to give it a good beating. But the noise kept getting between him and the keyboard. File cabinets getting banged around. A sound like an elephant stampede coming up the stairs. Some black kid, handcuffed to a chair, bitching that he hadn’t eaten in eight hours. Across the room, some black lady telling two uninterested detectives how her son got mugged. Another cop yelling at a real estate broker on the phone. And a car alarm going off in the parking lot downstairs.
Detective Sergeant McCullough closed his eyes and tried to shut it all out. He still pictured himself as a trim young greyhound leaping across rooftops to chase criminals. But in some obscure way he sensed that he was turning into one of those jowly older guys you always saw huffing and puffing up a stairway. All of a sudden he was forty. For years he’d been looking over his shoulder, expecting to see somebody patting him on the back for all his good work. But his last promotion was a couple of years ago and that transfer to the homicide task force looked like it was never going to come through now. No one was going to notice him unless he made the extra effort. Even his looks were starting to fade a little. There was getting to be more gray than blond in his hair and for the first time in his life he was having to comb it carefully to look presentable. His wife told him he was too old to get away with looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. The next thing you knew she’d be talking crazy about taking the kids and moving in with her mother again.
He glanced up at the clock. Almost eleven o’clock and he still hadn’t heard back from the guy at The New York Times’s op-ed page. He’d sent them three of his best pieces the week before, “Police Brutality: A Political Football,” “Let’s Go Auto: In Defense of Police Carrying Automatic Weapons,” and “‘Have a Nice Day, Officer’: On Better Community Relations.”
He fixed his holster strap and pounded the typewriter space bar. Writing was like getting sick, he thought sometimes. First he’d get infected by the idea. Then he’d go around for days, thinking about and talking about nothing else. It’d just get worse and worse, until he tried to sweat the sickness out into fifteen hundred words, double-spaced on six sheets of paper. But he’d only feel better once he got one of these fucking things published. It was just a matter of time, he told himself.
The two detectives across the room started telling the black lady how much paperwork her case would generate and how little chance there was of catching her son’s mugger. The cop yelling at the real estate broker on the phone started kicking blue paint chips off the wall. And the song on the radio kept going, “Get busy! Get busy!” like it was telling McCullough to work harder.
What more could he do? Everyone knew these pieces he wrote were good. Even his wife. What she never understood was why it was so important to get his name in the paper. But then she didn’t know what it was like to sit at a press conference and watch the Chief of Detectives, or the borough commander, or some other fat fuck get up and take credit for an investigation you’d devoted six months of your life to, like the rooftop sniper at the Polo Grounds houses or the Schomberg rapist. And she didn’t know what it was like to get laid off during the fiscal crisis and realize you couldn’t depend on the department to take care of you. And worst of all, she didn’t know what it was like to grow up in a family where everyone made detective, including your baby sister, and you had to practically get a fucking movie made about your life before they thought you were anybody special.
The “Get Busy” song finally ended and the car alarm downstairs stopped yowling. McCullough looked at the black pushbutton phone on his desk and wished it would just ring. Why couldn’t those people at the Times give him what he wanted? What he needed. To be recognized. To be reckoned with. The desire was like a gnawing in his heart. It’d mean so little to them and so much to him.
Across the room the two detectives had finally convinced the black lady it wasn’t worth her while to have them file a report about her son’s mugging. After she left the room, they whooped loudly and gave each other a high-five.
McCullough gingerly rolled a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. He’d have to try to write another piece, he thought sadly. He glanced around the room, looking for inspiration.
The cop who’d been talking to the real estate broker slam
med the phone down and began cursing. He got a beer out of the refrigerator and threw it against the wall. The car alarm downstairs went off again. Another song came on the radio, even more annoying than “Get Busy.” This one was called “Gettin’ Paid.”
McCullough put his hands up to his head and started rubbing his temples. All this racket going on, how was a man supposed to stand out?
6
IN THE NINETY SECONDS between appointments, I cross the hall and stick my head into Cathy Brody’s cubicle. “You hear somebody making noise outside my room before?” I ask in a deadpan voice.
Cathy, who has a long pinched face and bony white knuckles, is always scolding me like a schoolmarm for acting too friendly with my clients. I’ve heard that outside of work she’s in a sadomasochistic relationship. When you run into her at parties, she always seems bored and remote. Like you’d have to let her hit you with a desk lamp before she’d be interested in what you had to say.
But now she starts getting all flustered. “No, I didn’t hear anybody outside your office,” she says, trying to keep her headband and glasses perched on top of her head. “What happened?”
Of course I know she was one of the ones trying to listen in on my conversation with Richard Silver. “I don’t know,” I say. “Somebody was trying to spy on me. Maybe it’s one of those union things.”
“Why, that’s terrible,” she says.
“I know I can rely on you to kick their ass if you see them.”
“You certainly can,” Cathy says with a proud, prim look.
When I go back to my own cubicle, I discover my glasses are gone from my desk. One of my clients must’ve stolen them. Which confuses me more than it pisses me off. Who wants a pair of used prescription glasses? I try to get accustomed to squinting.
The day goes on. Eleven more regular clients come and go, including a pedophile from Port Authority, a former used car salesman, and a street peddler from Senegal who got in a fight with an American cab driver. It’s only 11:15.
Still no sign of Darryl King, though. I see five more people and then step out into the hall to clear my head. As I stand there, smoking a cigarette and listening to the other P.O.s talking to their clients, I think: If this job were a cartoon, it would be a hundred men sitting around with tiny hammers trying to break up huge rocks.
Slow Motion Riot Page 3
