by JJ Partridge
I thumbed through the message slips on my desk and saw one was from Tramonti with his cell phone number. He answered with a gruff “Yeah.” I identified myself. “It played right into Sonny’s hands. Just finished his news conference. Said he’s ‘not gonna knuckle under to anyone’, including, ... get this, ‘Jesse Kingdom’s campus crazies’. That’s an open invitation for some of his morons to get nasty. McCarthy, after he calmed down and only after a direct order, will still cooperate this weekend with Tuttle but there will be no extra cops to protect Kingdom tomorrow. If you guys have any influence, either turn that rally off or at least keep your kids from marching downtown.”
I said I would speak to McAllister and Tuttle but what could we do; we can’t control what Kingdom says and does.
Tramonti was silent for a moment and then switched gears. “Your protégé, Mr. Williams, is going to be coming in for another visit. Got a clerk who identified him as picking up a pizza around seven-thirty Friday night and his fingerprints are on the box found in her apartment, and all around the apartment, with a bunch of others we can’t identify, yet. And we got hair matches. You can guess from where. DNA matches come next. We’ll get some microscopy fiber matches on him eventually, so it comes down to time of death and his alibi. Because of the sex, McCarthy wants him vetted for The Stalker attacks too. Can you imagine?” He paused, as though waiting for my response. “Unless he’s got a couple of nuns saying he was praying the rosary with them late Friday night, he’s toast. I’m tellin’ you in case he calls. This time, no heroics!” I heard someone call to him and he said, “Got to go,” and hung up.
I put down the telephone, thinking that Lavelle Williams has an expensive lawyer and I’ve got enough on my plate. Lavelle Williams was now on his own.
* * *
The air was heavy as I drove home; a sliver of a moon was bathed in mist and there were no stars. As I left my garage—it’s around the corner from the house, halfway down The Hill on East Street—the first flakes were floating down, large and widely spaced. After checking the mail and putting my coat in the hall closet, I opened a Bass Ale, poured it into a mug, and took it to the loft where I changed into jeans and a chamois shirt. I sat in front of the television, used the remote, and breaking with Channel 11, turned to Channel 7’s “News at Six.”
Kingdom, W.A.R., and a boisterous crowd—impossible to tell how many were our kids—were brandishing placards and banners and hassling the police cordons spread in front of the Public Safety Building. The cameras had gotten there before McAllister and I arrived because there was Kingdom in the face of a police captain—the same one who had been with Steve Winter—demanding freedom for those detained. Kingdom appeared to be angry but in control.
Not so those who crowded around Kingdom; their soundbite quotes were pure toxin, with one white kid managing to grab the reporter’s mike to scream his insults at Sonny and the cops. Others gave purported eyewitness accounts of the melee, arrests, snarling dogs, and police brutality, peppered with profanity that hadn’t been edited out. Watching it, I could imagine the reactions of Kevin, Vinnie, and Tony in Elmwood, on Federal Hill, and Mount Pleasant, yelling into the kitchen to Mary, Rose, and Maria that the college punks were at it again!
This segment was followed by a live report, with the Public Safety Building in the background, from a reporter who read a police statement on the arrests, highlighting the names of six Carter students and one from RISD. The vacuous anchorman who tsk, tsked at the cut-away, made it clear that Mayor Russo had responded to events with bravado, and there was Sonny, his pudgy face twisted in anger, his rotund figure wrestling with emotion for the cameras, at his news conference, denouncing Jesse Kingdom, the “campus crazies”, and the “spoiled brats” from the tax-exempt university who were disrupting his city. Sonny was at his “stick it to ya” best; with Chief McCarthy, resplendent in white starched shirt with collar emblems, shiny badge, and black tie, standing at his side, he came across as a man in control.
I didn’t think it possible, but it got worse. Against a backdrop of College Hall, the co-anchor, a living, breathing, wide-eyed Barbie doll, described “... the death threat that both police and University are taking seriously” as the flyer with Kingdom’s photograph and the circle and slashes flashed on the screen. How did they get hold of that? She went on to describe the crumbling relationship between City Hall and the “elite” University.
“Give – me – a – break!” I said aloud, and exercised the viewer’s veto by pressing the power button on the remote. The riot, or whatever the media decides to call it, and its coverage would feed Sonny’s ego and play into his schemes against the University as well as fill his campaign coffers. What would Fausto be thinking? What was his brother going to do?
I was exasperated and needed company. I called Nadie and gave her a quick recap of the day.
“Haven’t you looked outside?” she exclaimed when I suggested she come over for dinner. She said she wasn’t hungry and then, “It’s really coming down. Up to five or six inches.”
“That’s what SUV’s are for. Snow.”
“I just washed my hair.”
“So?”
“I wasn’t planning on going out, Algy ....”
“Bundle up. I’ll be over and have you back in minutes.”
“No, I think ....”
“Please?”
“Algy, I’m really tired.” Then, she gave in. “You can come over for a few minutes if you want to but you can’t stay and I’m not going back with you.”
“Fine,” I said, figuring my chances of staying there were close to fifty-fifty, and hung up.
I finished the rest of the Bass and went downstairs. Two or three inches would cover the city’s grime for a day or two; five or six inches would paralyze the unprepared city and maybe be enough to cancel classes and Kingdom’s rally. As I rinsed out the mug, I pulled aside the curtains over the sink and watched snowflakes silently zigzag their way down onto the floodlit patio. Rummaging around in the hall closet, I found a pair of Totes boots, slipped on a leather jacket, fit the fedora firmly on my head, and locked the front door behind me.
The cold air was motionless. On the sidewalk, I stuck out my finger to catch one of the potato chip sized flakes and saw my breath evaporate in the streetlight. As I turned the corner at East Street and took mincing steps down to the garage, my footfalls making the familiar squishy sounds that go with soft snow, I felt better. Winter had arrived. The world was crisp and clean. I heaved up the garage door, intent on the challenge of seducing Nadie.
* * *
The attack came without warning. As I put out my hand to open the Range Rover’s door, I was vaguely conscious of a swishing in the air, ending in a sharp, glancing blow at the back of my head that landed full force on my shoulder. I heeled backward, stunned, as the fedora flew off; both hands went to my scalp, my knees buckled, and I crumpled against the car. I couldn’t stop my fall; my head grazed the fender and my forehead struck the tire’s nubby tread full on before I slid to the concrete. I was splayed out on the floor, dazed, when I took the brunt of somebody landing on my back; grasping fingers dug into my neck, closing my trachea, and my face was ground into the floor’s oily grit. What flashed into my mind? The Stalker.
What happened next was all reflex, part of a repertoire of moves learned as far back as high school wrestling and one-on-one training at Camp Lejeune. Mr. Winslow, the patient wrestling coach at Moses Brown, and D.I. Jones, a despised drill instructor, had hard wired a set of reactions in my physical memory. Without plan or thought, my body arched up, rocked forward, and his head crunched into the wheel hub with its jutting lugs. My knees got under my body and that gave me the leverage to buck upwards, grab his knee, and crack it into the edge of the wheel well. Another wrench yielded a muffled cry and a smash of bone against metal, and I felt him slipping off me. I jabbed back with an elbow that thudded into cartilage, produced a gasp of sucked-in air, and he was off me.
That was all I ha
d. My breath was gone, blood pounded in my head like a steam engine, pain sprinted up my spine. My right shoulder seemed paralyzed. It took a teeth-clamping effort to turn toward the open garage door when he lurched on to East Street.
He should have gotten away; I had no thought of pursuit until he slipped in the snow and went sprawling into the curb. I saw his struggle to his knees and unsteady attempts to stand in slow motion. In those few seconds, something happened—second wind, an adrenaline surge, who knows—but I went from prone to crouch to standing, charged out of the garage, and tackled him below his waist, hurtling him facedown into the snow. I clung to him as he thrashed beneath me and boosted myself on to his back; he tried to bronco me off and I smashed the back of his neck with my hands clenched together in a single fist. Even with the snow cushion, his head hit the pavement hard. He didn’t move.
My lungs were now completely blown, my heart pounded against my ribs, the back of my head throbbed in time with my heightened heartbeat. My face stung as the falling snow wet the cuts on my forehead, cheeks, and chin. Pain helped to cut through my mental miasma, to realize that in a few seconds, whatever strength I could marshal would be sapped and he could break away. My voice would have to enforce my control.
It came out unrecognizable. “Get up!” boomed in the quiet as my right hand went under the hood of the parka and grabbed his neck while forcing an arm behind his back with my left. He yelped and I leaned in close to his head. “On your knees. Real slow, or I’ll break your arm!” He squirmed and I remembered that if I could get to his trapezius muscle, I could paralyze his arm and shoulder; instead, I chose the easier option of pushing his wrist up a notch. That brought shaky compliance.
As he struggled to stand under my restraint, my brain caught up with reality: he might have a weapon! My hand shook as I released his neck and reached into a parka pocket; my scraped fingers touched something hard and I withdrew a screwdriver, sharp and heavy-duty, ideal for breaking and entering ... and maiming. A snippet from an old gangster movie registered and the point of the screwdriver went, not gently, into his ear. He tried to duck away from the pressure. I muttered, “It’s the screwdriver. You’re going to stand. Slowly. We are going to walk up the hill. Slowly. If you make any move I don’t like, I’m going to push it right into your brain.”
His breathing was tortured as I shoved him forward. Lights were on in the houses facing us on Congdon Street but would shouts penetrate any of those buttoned-up dwellings? Would a cry for help reveal my weakness? I didn’t want him to think; I wanted him to be terrified that I’d push in the screwdriver. The light was on at my front door and I muscled him up the walk. Through clenched teeth, I croaked, “I’m going to release your arm. You move an inch and the screwdriver goes in,” and let go of his wrist. His arm fell limply while I fished for my keys in my jeans’ pockets, opened the storm door, and fed the key into the lock. When we got inside, I bullied him down the hall and through the swinging door to the kitchen where the ceiling lights were on. Pressure from the screwdriver forced him into one of the spindle-back chairs at the counter. “Man, you’re hurtin’ me!” he whimpered. “Watch out with dat tool!”
The voice was young and frightened.
I wiped sweat from my eyes and my fingers tingled in pain. “Drop your pants!”
“Wha’ ...?” earned him a stab of coercion in his ear. “Stop it, man. Please don’t, don’t, don’t ...,” he pleaded and unfastened the belt around his floppy pants and pulled them over his buttocks and down his legs to a pair of wet, unlaced Nikes.
“... And your shorts. Down to your knees. Move!” Clumsily, he did as ordered. “Put your hands behind you. Through the chair back, through the spindles.” He struggled to get his hands through the narrowly spaced spindles while I pocketed the screwdriver, removed the belt from his pants, looped the belt around his wrists, wove it through the spindles, and tied a good Navy knot. For good measure, I wrenched his parka over and around the back of the chair. It was all makeshift, but it would hold.
My own jacket, scuffed-up and oil-stained, was dumped on the counter as I went around to face him. He looked maybe nineteen, not past twenty. His head was cocked to one side; an open wound above an eyebrow—maybe where his face met a lug nut—leaked blood. His open mouth displayed irregular teeth; a growth of skimpy whiskers covered his chin. At his hairline, where the first follicles sprouted like surgical stitches, his almost-shaved head had two razor cuts on either side, an inch or so over tiny ears with silver rings in the lobes. A tattoo, maybe the tip of a wing, went halfway up his neck from inside a zippered hooded sweatshirt that howled “Lakers.” What I had thought was a parka turned out to be an oversized, padded, red, white, and blue Patriots jacket that gave him false heft. He was, in fact, slim, although broad-shouldered.
My inspection produced the beginning of a smirk at the corners of his mouth, and ignited a pent up, raw anger in me. My left hand fingers curled; I took a deep breath, and forced my hand to relax, but when his smirk broke into an insolent sneer, I lost it. I grabbed the front of his sweatshirt, pulled him toward me, and hit him squarely on the jaw with a roundhouse left. His head snapped back and he and the chair toppled to the floor.
The shock of pain that streaked through my hand brought back some control. What was I doing? I shook the pain away, and climbed over his coiling body, went to the sink, catching in the window above it, the reflection of someone I hardly recognized, someone wild-haired, dirty, bloody, and furious, with lips swollen and encrusted with blood. I splashed cold water on my face, and from beneath the dirt and oil smears, felt the sharp bite of scrapes and cuts on my forehead, chin, and jaw. My bruised fingers went to the throbbing at the back of my head and came back streaked with red.
“You gone crazy, man? Are you fuckin’ nuts?” came a bawling cry from the floor as he struggled against his restraints, angling the chair away from the counter with his feet.
I was ashamed. My gorge of rage had been spent; I didn’t know that something so terribly elemental existed within me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I grabbed him under the arms and pulled his body with attached chair upright. Sweat trickled from his forehead to his scratched cheeks; his eyes were huge as a purposefully rough search of his jacket’s pockets produced a woolen watch cap, a pager, and a crumpled cigarette pack. His eyes followed the pack as I threw it on to the counter; I squeezed it open, inserted a finger, and out popped four lumpy joints. A slit in his jacket’s lining produced two plastic bags of yellowish granules and a roll of twenties and fifties, maybe six or seven hundred dollars; he didn’t flinch when I flashed the stash in his face and tossed it on the counter. In his jeans was a cheap wallet containing a hundred dollar bill and a New York driver’s license. I removed the license and raised it to the light.
Lavelle Williams wore his hair in cornrows a year earlier when the Polaroid ID photo was snapped at the registry.
Somehow, I knew it was him, as far back as forcing him up East Street. If the kitchen telephone hadn’t rung, stopping a rush of anger, and jolting him as though a firecracker had exploded in his backside, I could have whacked him again. I ignored the rings and threw the wallet and license on the counter. My hands remained balled into fists. “Why?” I asked.
His chin squeezed his chest, making his voice small and tinny. “I didn’t start out comin’ here. Da cops got my car, my place staked out. Hadda get out of da hood, started walkin’ over to Fox Point when it starts ta snow. My friends ....” His voice trailed off, maybe to a different story. “Saw your house. Nobody’d be lookin’ for me ’round your house. The Reverend said you da big man, told me where ya lived, when we were …. I was gonna stay outta da snow, and den get out.” He raised his head and maybe there was a glimmer of remorse in his voice when he continued, “When ya come in ..., I ... panicked.”
Through the fog of my anger, I could imagine him in the darkness of the garage: he hears footsteps, the garage door rolls up, and somebody walks in. Who’s that? A cop? S
omebody who saw him break in? I caught myself, despite a fleeting recollection of Native Son; what difference did his panic make? He had come purposefully to my garage, I had surprised him, and he had attacked me!
“Bullshit!”
He jerked his head away from an expected blow but I was back in control. What I wanted more than anything was to scare the living shit out of him, to make him cower, and I wasn’t sure why. “You sure screwed up. You picked absolutely the wrong guy to mess with. Let’s see ...”—I picked up the screwdriver from the counter, then dropped it for noisy emphasis—“... breaking and entering, assault, assault with a deadly weapon ...”—repeating my performance with the plastic bags and the cigarette pack—“... possession of marijuana and ... crack? While out on bail for possession and sale? You’ve five to ten coming at the ACI. The judge will love how you assaulted someone who tried to help you.” My threat got no reaction, leaving me to stoop to his level—in more ways than one—when I put my face within inches of his. “The cops want your ass for Anne Sullivan’s murder. Nobody’s going to help you now. Not Reverend Thomas, not Franks, certainly not ... Senor Flores. You’re too far off the reservation. You’re all alone now.”
He had taken it all in with a punk’s stolidity until I said “Flores.” At that name, his face twitched. I had breached his defenses, but since he had too little emotional range, he reverted to type. His tongue brushed his swollen lips and he muttered, “Go fuck yourself.”