The Department had switched from Crown Vics to Chevy Malibus and, as usual, Chris drove so that Big Jim could scan the sidewalks for gang-bangers, druggies, hookers, pimps, lookouts, dealers, parolees and other persons of interest, not so much to bust them as to keep up on who was doing what to whom.
“See that kid with the red hair?” Big Jim pointed to a beefy guy in his early twenties carrying a bag of groceries. Chris took his eyes off the traffic for a quick glance.
“Who’s he?”
“He used to boost cars for a bunch of crooks operating out of a warehouse near the Port. Now he’s the cook at Salciccio’s.”
“The bar on Western?”
“They serve food too. He’s studying to become a pastry chef. He makes one hell of an Alsatian apple pie.”
Chris didn’t know what to say. Big Jim was always coming up with stuff like that, oddball comments out of the blue. Chris knew that Big Jim was getting at something but he didn’t know what. It wouldn’t do him any good to ask. He knew that Big Jim wanted him to figure it out on his own. Half the time Chris felt as if he was a contestant in a game-show with Big Jim tallying the score.
“How do you know him?” Chris asked.
“His name’s Terry Connelly. I collared him sliding a Slim Jim into a 500S over in Ardenwood. I was visiting a lady friend and practically tripped over him on the way back to my car. He could’ve run but he didn’t. He just looked at my tin and held up his hands. He could’ve taken a swing at me with the Slim Jim and maybe done some damage. I sure as hell didn’t have any backup. As I was busting him I was thinking, ‘Hey, Jim, what are you getting yourself into here?’“
“But, he just gave up?”
“It didn’t take me long to figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“That he wanted it to be over. I could tell that he didn’t want to be a thief anymore.”
“You could just tell? How?”
Big Jim knew that Chris wanted a set of clear, simple rules, some mechanism that could be used to disassemble events into their component parts, neat and clean — ‘This means this. That means that.’ But people aren’t black and white. They aren’t Star Trek’s Mr. Spock running some emotionless computer program behind their eyes. Big Jim sighed and tried to figure out how to put what he knew into words that Chris could understand.
“Just for a second I saw it on his face,” Big Jim began, “surrender, like a guy who gets up every morning expecting to be collared and is relieved when it finally happens, when the running and hiding is finally over. As soon as I flashed my badge the kid slouched. His shoulders slumped. He let his arms hang loose and he dropped the Slim Jim without me having to tell him to. You watch a guy’s hands and you’ll always know if he’s going to fight you. A man’s face can lie but not his shoulders or his hands, or his feet for that matter. That’s when I knew that some part of the kid had been waiting for an excuse to get out of that life.”
“And you were that excuse?” Chris asked, glancing briefly at Big Jim before pulling a left on Congress Avenue.
“I knew I could be that reason, if I handled it right.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Here’s the thing, Chris. People who are doing what they want to be doing are competitors. Businessmen, car thieves, politicians, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to fight back against anyone who tries to stop them. You can’t give those people an inch or they’ll run right over you. But when a guy wants to give it up, that’s when you’ve got a chance to turn him around. Some cops will tell you that the way to do that is to crush him into the dirt and then you’ll own him.”
“Some cops like Teddy Joy you mean.”
“I’m not mentioning any names but, yeah, assholes like Teddy Joy. Let me tell you something, Chris — people will always do more for you out of love than out of fear. You see a guy who’s down, who you can really help — I don’t mean some scumbag loser who wants you to give him a free ride, but somebody who can still be saved — you do what you can for him and he’ll remember that and, maybe, someday he’ll help you. What goes around, comes around. People will surprise you. They will.”
That was one of Big Jim’s favorite sayings: People will surprise you. Chris had heard it a hundred times and he still didn’t really understand it. People always surprised him. Practically everything people did was a surprise to him. They were illogical and irrational, ruled by their emotions and their self-destructive needs and obsessions. But saying that wasn’t going to get him any closer to figuring out the lesson that Big Jim was trying to teach him.
“So, you helped this Terry Connelly? How? Did you let him go?”
“What would he have learned if I had done that?” Big Jim almost laughed. “People never value stuff they get for free. They have to earn it for themselves for it to mean anything. So, no, I didn’t let him go. I locked him up.”
Then what was the lesson? Chris wondered. Don’t give a criminal a free pass? No, he was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Chris stayed silent and after a moment, Big Jim continued on his own.
“I thought about turning him, making him my CI, but I didn’t think the kid’s heart was in it anymore. He would have screwed it up and maybe gotten himself shot or dead. Anyway, I went to the arraignment the next morning and I asked the Deputy D.A. to let him out on an OR, then I bought him a hamburger and talked to him. I just asked him what he would do with his life if he got the chance to change things.”
“And he told you he wanted to be a pastry chef?”
“No, he told me that he liked to cook. I asked Sonny Salciccio to give Terry a job in his kitchen and see if he had any talent. It turned out that he was pretty good at it.” Big Jim turned back to the window and studied the faces drifting past. “He’s a good kid, Terry. He just needed a chance to turn his life around, to do the right thing. It’s always the right time to do the right thing,” Big Jim said, recalling a famous quote from Martin Luther King.
Big Jim was silent and for thirty seconds Chris tried to figure out the point of the story, the lesson that Big Jim was trying to teach him. He evaluated and discarded two or three theories before settling on one — You need to have a generous heart. He wanted to ask Big Jim if that was it, but Big Jim wouldn’t have answered. It didn’t work that way. Chris knew that he had to figure it out on his own as best he could.
Chris turned onto Speedway and approached the Naughty Lady bar where Johnny-Boy Watkins ran his string of girls. Big Jim watched the street but if he could have read Chris’ mind he would have smiled, pleased that his partner had figured out the point of the story after all.