Directly outside Freedomtown, Jesse sat in her brother’s car waiting for Lorenzo and Brenda to return to the Crown Victoria, which was parked by the water’s edge a few hundred feet inside the gate. The Chrysler had suffered heatstroke, and as Ben worked under the hood, feeding two quarts of bottled water into the radiator, Jesse reached out for her editor, the cell phone sweat-glued to the side of her face.
“Jose.”
“Where you been?”
“I need you to hold up the run.”
“Why.” Jesse didn’t answer. “She gave it up?”
“I didn’t say that.” Ben slammed down the hood, making her jump.
“She gave it up,” Jose said, marveling. “Fuckin’ A.”
“I didn’t say that,” Jesse said, working him. Karen Collucci appeared, walking down the footpath, passing Lorenzo’s car and heading for the exit.
“Tell me what you got.”
“Can you hold it for me till seven?” she said, watching Karen’s approach.
“What do you got?”
“Just hold it for me till seven.”
“Tell me about the boyfriend.”
Karen passed through the gate and Jesse hung up. “Hey.” Karen leaned into Jesse’s open window and nodded toward the phone. “You just call it in?”
“Of course not.” Jesse shrugged.
“She didn’t,” Ben seconded.
“Shut up,” Jesse snapped at her brother.
“Can you give me a lift?” Karen asked Ben.
“Whoa, I’m supposed to wait for Lorenzo,” Jesse said quickly, panicking at the idea of missing them coming out, missing her payoff back in the Southern District men’s room.
“Just drop me off on Jessup. It’s like two minutes,” Karen said. “They’re gonna be a while yet.”
As Ben pulled out into traffic, Jesse turned to Karen in the backseat.
“The body’s in there?” Karen shrugged, lit a cigarette. “How’s she holding up?”
Karen took a while returning her lighter to her purse before answering. “Hanging in.”
“So what do you do from here?” Jesse asked, giving up.
“Me? Go home, hope the hot line doesn’t ring.”
“No news is good news?”
“You got that right,” Ben answered for Karen.
“Tomorrow’s Pete’s birthday,” Karen said, coughing into her fist. “I got to order the cake, buy the stuff for the party. He likes this Japanese computer pet or something—all the kids have them. They’re like impossible to find. I mean the thing’s a horror. It dies on you if you don’t take care of it, which to me, of all people—”
“Who’s Pete?” Jesse asked, thinking of Louis.
“My son,” Karen said evenly. “You saw him.”
The kid with the flipper hand. Jesse’s head dropped to her chest. “Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she mumbled.
“For what?” Jesse couldn’t respond. “You mean what you did?” Karen answered for her. “Forget it. Pete’s a tough kid. People like you, you know, react how you did. It’s OK. It toughens him up, because that’s the way it is, and me and Louis, we’re not going to be around forever, and he’s got to be ready, so when stuff like that happens? I consider that basic training. Pete’s great. Pete’s gonna be president.”
“I just want you to understand—”
“Forget it,” she said tersely, and Jesse was happy to oblige.
After they dropped Karen off at a cabstand, Jesse made a quick run into a deli for coffee and cigarettes. There were two Lotto customers ahead of her at the register, and as she danced in place, anxious to make it back to Freedomtown, she saw a black kid, nineteen, twenty, approaching the line from the rear of the store, a quart bottle of Coke in one hand and a box of Ring Dings in the other. Silk-screened across the chest of his white T-shirt was the police sketch of Brenda’s jacker.
Jesse was so startled by the unexpected image that she straight-out accosted him. “Where’d you get that?” she said, spooking the kid with her abruptness. “That’s, somebody’s selling that?”
“Guy on JFK,” he answered cautiously.
“What guy.”
“That your idea of a joke?” the deli owner, a heavyset man with a florid face and a full head of silver-white hair pitched in, glaring at the T-shirt as he processed a Lotto ticket.
“Ain’t no joke,” the black kid said, a little steadier. “Ain’t nothing funny about it.”
“So, what—that guy’s a hero to you? A role model? Enlighten me, I’m too fucking stupid to understand.” The kid looked off, tried to grin away his anger, his discomfort. “You know what that T-shirt represents?” The deli man addressed the second Lotto customer. “That T-shirt represents the death of intelligence, the death of decency.”
The kid made a hissing sound, and Jesse saw him looking at his Coke and Ring Dings as if unsure what to do with them now.
“Decency is dead,” the deli man answered, growing more red-faced. “All hail King Bullshit.”
“This like Klan country,” the kid muttered.
“This is what?” The deli man leaned across his counter. “Excuse me. This is what?” The silver of his hair intensified the blooming darkness of his face.
“You heard me,” the kid said shakily, unconsciously stepping back. Jesse noticed a young cop back by the sandwich counter, the guy sporting the Hawaiian shirt and stonewashed jeans that screamed Gannon Narcotics.
“What…” The deli man continued to inflate. “You think we owe you something?”
The kid looked confused. “You hear me ask for something?”
“Everybody owes you, right? Everybody—we all fucking owe you.” The kid looked at Jesse, his face twisted in irritated bewilderment. “Four hundred years,” the deli man moaned, doing the Lawdy, Lawdy, rolling his eyes and wiggling his fingers toward heaven. “Four hundred years. Well, I tell you what.” He almost poked the kid in the chest from across the counter. “Let’s just go back fifty. Who do you think did all the dying in World War II, huh? Just answer me that.” Jesse had never heard that one before and was taken, almost captivated, by its sheer massiveness.
“Yeah? How about Vietnam?” the kid bounced back.
“Yo, George!” the cop half barked, half moaned, hungry.
“Vietnam?” The deli man reared up, then leaned across his counter again. “Let me tell you about Vietnam.”
Jesse had to go but couldn’t leave this back-and-forth right here; it was like putting her ear to the rail in order to hear the train coming, the news coming.
“You go down to the Wall, my friend,” the deli man said, touching the kid’s sternum, the contact charged. “You go down there and see who shows up to weep. Do a head count. Stand there for an hour and do a head count.”
“A head count,” the kid said dryly. “Like, us, them, us, them, like that?” He was getting into it now.
“You shit-skin smart-ass piece of shit,” the deli man began to shout. “I’m three weeks in the hospital, you think I come back to work to put up with you? You think I come out of the hospital to deal with you?”
“Hey,” the kid said, stepping back, hands up, playing it cool.
“Get the fuck out of my store,” the deli man bellowed, extending a beefy, tanned arm toward the door, the faded blue ghost of an anchor tattoo visible inside his elbow.
“You want me to put these back on the shelves? Or can I just leave them here on the counter,” the kid asked, fighting down a smirk, the winner.
The deli man made a big, windy move to come around the register, and the kid left.
Coming outside a moment later with a fresh pack of Winstons, Jesse saw the kid on a pay phone. She gestured to Ben, deciding to invest a few minutes in hanging around. Three drags into her first cigarette the cop came out, eating his sandwich on the hoof. “Hey, you,” he barked, a food-garbled heads up directed to the kid on the phone.
The kid wheeled, made him for a cop, and returned to his conversation. The cop wolfed down the rest of his sandwich, waiting.
“Yo, Mo, gotta go” The kid turned again. “Tell her you’ll call her back in a minute,” the cop said, wiping his lips with his thumb. The kid gave it ten, fifteen more seconds for good-bye, then hung up, the cop waving him forward. “That guy in there?” The cop looked off as he spoke.” George? He’s an asshole.” The kid said nothing, waiting for the punch line. “But I’m not too sure about your intellectual status either, my man. It’s a free country and all, and I have a feeling I know where you might be coming from on this,” he said, nodding at the T-shirt, “but I got to tell you, wearing something like that around here? It’s…” He squinted, searching for the right word. “It’s in delicate.”
“Hey.” The kid smiled, framed the jacker on his chest with the splayed fingers of both hands. “Don’t you know who this is?”
“No.” The cop wiped his lips with the side of his fist. “Pray tell.”
“This is the boogie man.” The kid’s grin kicked up a notch. “This is me.”
Pulling up in front of Freedomtown again, Jesse saw one of the nondescript tan Crime Scene Unit minivans parked alongside Lorenzo’s Crown Victoria. She had spent two weeks riding around in one of those death wagons a few summers back, and although the vehicle never transported the bodies, Jesse was convinced, by the third night out on the town, that the van interior reeked of fresh death, a sweetish, cloying aroma that hung in the air like smoke.
Within minutes of Jesse and Ben’s return to the gate, Lorenzo, half carrying Brenda, came into view from around the first bend in the footpath. Without thinking, Jesse popped out of the car and began to approach them. Lorenzo waved her away furiously, and Brenda, once she recognized Jesse, turned her face into the big man’s shoulder, as if attempting to avoid the press. Jesse got back in Ben’s car and waited for Lorenzo to pull away.
Twenty minutes later, Ben dropped her off at the Southern District Station House. Head down, floating like a monk, she followed Lorenzo and Brenda into the lobby. She could tell, by the absolute silence that greeted them, that the word had gone out.
There was none of the usual bullshit and blather from the sergeant’s desk, none of the jokes, small talk, or shout-outs, just a vibration of cold curiosity hiding behind a screen of petty activity. Lorenzo, without engaging any of the stares sent his way, hustled Brenda across the floor and up the stairs. Intent on collecting her due, Jesse continued to bring up the rear.
Ignoring Jesse, Lorenzo deposited Brenda in the third-floor interview room, then quickstepped back into the hallway and rapped on Bobby McDonald’s door. Jesse positioned herself halfway up the stairs to the fourth floor, so that when Lorenzo opened his boss’s door she had a clear shot of the office, Bobby McDonald in there wiping down his glass-topped desk, a bottle of Fantastik in one hand, a bunched floret of paper towel in the other.
“You charge her?” Bobby asked Lorenzo, eyes still trained on his chore.
“Not yet. She’s still talking to me.”
“OK,” Bobby said. “Good,” he added, then “Shit,” tossing the paper towels into a wastebasket. He sat on the edge of the desk, massaging his temples. “Motherfucker.”
“I hear you,” Lorenzo said mildly. He was standing with his back to Jesse, but from the stairs she could read his bobbling two-step in the doorway just fine.
“We had no choice,” McDonald addressed the air, explaining the situation to the prosecutor, the cameras, himself. “There was a child involved.”
“That’s right,” Lorenzo said, straight-out dancing now.
“Fuck, man,” McDonald hissed. “This is gonna be like the Night of the Long Knives.”
“May be.” Lorenzo was almost doing jumping jacks. “I need to get in there with her. You gonna be listening in?”
“Yeah.” McDonald nodded toward the pig-nosed amp resting on his desk. “But just me.”
Thinking, Out of sight out of mind, Jesse made it into the third-floor men’s room before Lorenzo left his boss’s office. A uniformed cop, enjoying a smoke, stood looking out an open window between a sink and a urinal, and she swiftly moved to the nearest toilet stall, locking herself in before he could react to her presence. Taking a seat on the toilet lid, she found herself facing a graffiti-drizzled stall door centered with a bumper sticker declaring police!! don’t move!! It wasn’t a joke, she knew, but a ubiquitous reminder, plastered throughout the building, for cops to pronounce “Police” distinctly when drawing down on an actor. The word, when rushed, often sounded like “Please.”
Jesse set up shop—cigarettes, lighter, pens, notepad. The wall behind the toilets was stripped to bare studs and a single layer of Sheetrock on the far side, a renovation project frozen by budget cuts and a change of administration. She could hear Brenda cough on the other side, the sound making her feel a little skippy in the gut, then heard the door to the interview room opening and closing, followed by a heavy shuffling tread—Lorenzo. Jesse pressed the side of her face to the smutty Sheetrock.
“Brenda,” Lorenzo said, his voice muffled yet distinct, “before we start, can I get you something? Tea, soda, a sandwich?”
“You know—” Brenda began. But before she could complete her sentence, her voice was obliterated as the men’s room door was thrown open to a stampede of cops. Jesse heard voices both male and female, hectic, competitive, racing for a piece of the bathroom wall—everybody, Jesse realized, wanting an earful on this one.