Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “Mrs. McEnery, we know your boy’s a good boy. The way we see it, he probably got into something he couldn’t control. Now you know and I know that he can’t just go off to Jersey because his youth worker has to see him every week and he has to tell her when he goes, which didn’t happen. Now all we want to do is talk to him, maybe he had nothing to do with the … incident.”

  Kennedy had not told Mrs. McEnery that there was a John Doe lying on a gurney downtown and that her son was their prime suspect in the death. He had found over the years that it was better to deliver bad news in small doses, so that people didn’t get too hysterical.

  “I’m telling you that my son is so in Jersey! You can ask his Uncle Ray! He was going to tell his worker but he couldn’t get through to her, her phone was busy, and when he went over to tell her she was out of the office.”

  “Can you give me your sister’s phone number? If your sister can vouch for the fact that Dennis was at her place yesterday evening, then that’s the end of it.”

  “She don’t have no—She doesn’t have any phone right now. They’re having some trouble with the lines.”

  “Then how was he going to phone you?”

  “He was going to use a phone next door.”

  “Can you give me your sister’s address? I’ll have a State car drop in and talk to him.”

  “She’s not in right now. That wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Isn’t she expecting your son?”

  “Yes, but they were going to go for a drive. My son had to go out there because he was supposed to drive the car—they had to go for a drive and—”

  Kennedy shook his head slowly.

  “And so Dennis was going to … He had just got his license, you see …”

  She was looking for something in the detective’s face, some sign that he wasn’t bad bull, some reason to believe that there was a way out of this for her son. When it came down to the two of them sitting in her place with the sound of the kids playing stickball in the street, car horns and radios playing, the day outside clear and bright, you could see that she was coming apart. This was why Kennedy didn’t hate the blacks, and why most of the street cops in the NYPD talked a rougher game than they played. You couldn’t sit on a chair in a woman’s front room and wait for her to give up a second son without making a connection with her. You could hate a people but you had to be working on a Fiberglas heart to hate the one in front of you. Every day of his life Eddie Kennedy had a chance to resist his humanity and save some of his strength to take home with him, and every day he couldn’t do it. Grace McEnery, looking at him out of thirty-five years of a life Kennedy could never really feel, saw this quality in him and it broke her. She stood up, seemed about to run, twisted her blouse under her hands, made a move to sit down again, and began to cry silently, from the throat at first, and then more deeply, until her body was shaken and wracked with the force of it. Kennedy waited a moment, his head down, feeling oddly false, as if he had stolen something of value and was here to make amends. The sounds of a broom sweeping back and forth across a wooden floor came down from the apartment above them. He looked around the room, at the Hitachi color TV and the Marantz stereo system, at another schoolboy photo of a young black man with a fine-planed open face, a bright insolent smile—a beautiful boy, really, too old to be Dennis. It had been framed in what looked like sterling silver. The rest of the room was austere and barren. The couch had been patched with tape over both of the armrests, skillfully and with care. Maksins coughed at Kennedy from the hall. At the sound, Grace McEnery raise her head again. When she saw Wolfgar Maksins standing in the room, his face a flat mask, holding a picture of her youngest boy, she gathered herself with a deep breath.

  She spoke only to Kennedy. “He never came home last night. He said he was going to go to the Cosmo to see a movie. I don’t like to let him go out all the time but he’s almost grown now. He’s a good boy, but what’s he going to do, hanging around on the stoop? He’s got no job. I can’t keep him home all the time.”

  Maksins broke into the speech. “Where is the kid, ma’am? It’s better for him if you just tell us where he is and we go get him. Somebody else gets him, they may not be so easy on him.”

  She looked desolate, ashamed at what she had to say.

  “I don’t know where he is, officer! He just never came home last night at all!”

  “Lady, you let that kid—a record like he’s got—you let him run around all night long? How’d you know something bad hadn’t happened to him?”

  She had no answer for that. The trouble was, she did know that something bad had happened to him. And she knew he was running from it.

  They watched her as she got her nerve together.

  “What was it? What are you after him for? Did he hurt somebody?”

  Kennedy spoke up, to head off something vicious he could feel building up in Maksins. “Ma’am, we don’t know that for sure. We just need to talk to him. Do you know if he had any friends, any place where he might have gone, somebody who would give him a place to sleep?”

  She was a tough woman. Kennedy could see her gathering her strength. How was it that a boy, two boys, could grow up with this kind of a woman for a mother, and both go so wrong? One dead, perhaps another going to Attica. How about a woman like Veronica Perry, a power in the PTA at the public school the kids from 114th Street attended? That woman had put her whole life into her kids. Grace McEnery was another in the mold, and it had gone even more badly for her sons.

  “Yes, I know who he’d be with. He’s always hanging around with a boy named Denzel Willoughby. They hooked up together when Dennis was at Rikers last year. I told him not to be hanging out with that child. He’s a bad child and he was just going to get Dennis into trouble.”

  Maksins was making notes. Kennedy kept her attention, trying to keep the connection. The feelings against police ran deep and permanently through Harlem. No one gave them anything, no one talked to them, and anyone who did was often driven out of the area by the anger of her neighbors. Even a woman who lost two sons.

  “Do you know where this Denzel Willoughby lives, Mrs. McEnery? Could you give us an address?”

  “No, he never would say where he lived. I know Dennis went there sometimes. I think it was up on a Hundred Forty-fourth Street, in a project up there.”

  Maksins asked her if it might be the Drew Hamilton Houses.

  “Maybe. It was a project up there, but I don’t know which one. But if Dennis is in trouble I can tell you right now that it was none of his doing. That other boy, he’s a mean child, never had any use for him at all.”

  “Can you remember what he looked like?”

  “Bad-looking boy, always preening himself and lifting weights. He had lumpy skin and he was always getting into fights.”

  “He had lumpy skin, ma’am?”

  “Yes, he has some kind of skin disease. Uncle Ray says it’s heredity, like that.”

  Kennedy nodded to Wolfgar, who went outside to the car to get Farrell to search the NYSIIS lists for a Denzel Willoughby. As he left, the gray-haired older man who’d been sitting in the bedroom came into the room and sat down beside Grace McEnery. She wound her hand in his. He pulled on his pipe and sat next to her without speaking, staring at the floor, one foot resting on the other, his other hand laid flat along his thigh. There were heavy lines in his face, and his eyes were hidden under thick white brows.

  An incongruous sense of social obligation led Grace McEnery to introduce the man as Raymond Washington. Kennedy leaned forward to offer his hand. The man did not look up and made no move to take it. Kennedy drew back again.

  Maksins called from the door. “Eddie, we’ve got an address on the Willoughby kid. Come on.”

  When Kennedy got up to leave, the old man followed him out to the detective’s car. There were people on every stoop. Maksins was leaning on the driver’s door of a blue-and-white marked NSU, talking to a hard-faced white sergeant with mirrored aviator glasses and a gunfight
er’s moustache. Three younger officers, one of them a pale-blond woman, not much more than a girl, were sitting in the NSU car.

  Kennedy waited for the old man to come down the steps, spilling ashes from his pipe, moving as if his joints were locking up. He got to the bottom step, sighed heavily, and stared about at the people on the block, and the people leaning out of upper windows, and the knots of surly black teens gathered in small groups up and down the sidewalk.

  Kennedy, sensing that the man wanted to say his piece away from the mother, lit a cigarette and waited for him.

  When Raymond Washington did finally raise his head, somebody from across the street called him an oreo. He paid no attention. “You goin’ after the boy now, Detective? You goin’ send that cracker you got with you after him?”

  The man made no attempt to lower his voice. Maksins was easily close enough to hear, although he showed no sign. Kennedy said nothing.

  “Grace, she don’t have a bit of sense about that boy, but you got to understand he growed up here, he be seein’ all the street dudes with pockets of cash, with Cadillacs, with suits on. His older brother, he was a street boss around here. Grace is a good woman, but no kind of good woman can keep a man out of trouble around a Hundred Sixteenth Street.”

  Maksins got into the detective’s car and slammed the door hard. Kennedy shrugged at the old man.

  “Mr. Washington, if the boy shows up around here, or he gives you a call, will you tell him to come in? He’s got to come in—you know that. There’s a call out on him. They’ll be looking for him. It’s a dangerous thing, up here. The cops are going to be nervous about him.”

  “No, sir, I won’t tell that child to come in. And don’t be shuckin’ me, Mister Detective. You’ll put a car on the block and wait for him to come home. I just askin’ you, you keep that partner of yours off that boy. I see him, nothin’ make him happier than using that big old piece of his on Grace’s last child. I don’t think that boy’s a lost boy yet, but I tell you, you let that man kill her boy, you might as well come back here, put a bullet into her and be done with the whole family! Yessir!”

  And that was that. He turned and began to work his way back up the steps. Kennedy watched him go. The old man’s braces were attached to the waist of his worn-out pants with safety pins. His heels were worn to the uppers.

  When Kennedy got into the car, Maksins accelerated away, forcing a group of black boys to jump out of his path.

  “Shit, Eddie. You can be a real pussy sometimes!”

  “Yeah, Wolfie? Fuck you too.”

  There was a strained silence in the car all the way to the corner. When Kennedy looked back he could see a crowd of boys around the McEnery flat. In Harlem, there is no good reason for talking to a cop, not a single one.

  “Dancing shoes,” said Kennedy, mostly to himself. Maksins slammed on the brakes.

  “What shoes? Eddie, what the hell is the matter with you these days?”

  Kennedy didn’t look at his partner. “Mr. Washington, the old guy. He was wearing a pair of black patent-leather dancing shoes. You know, like they used to wear at the Cotton Club, in the movies?”

  Maksins said nothing. He pulled away with a snarl.

  There was no one home at the Willoughby apartment in the Drew Hamilton Houses on 144th Street. Although they had sent out a radio call for a Dennis McEnery, both men knew that life in the precincts up here was busy enough without taking on the work of a pair of alien DTs from Midtown. They had some hamburgers at a White Rock which Maksins insisted on eating inside. He leaned up against the windows of the place, his jacket undone, with a pair of Serengeti sunglasses on, working his way through the hamburger and staring at every black kid who came into the place. The reaction was always the same. They’d bop into the restaurant talking fast, laughing with friends, jumping and pushing each other, and then one of them would notice the two white men standing beside the door; he’d shove another, the word would go around, and they’d all shut up tight. Maksins liked the effect. He seemed to have an inexhaustible reserve of dislike for blacks. Kennedy took this shit for about three minutes, and then he went back out to the car, got in, closed all the windows, and turned on the air-conditioning. Cops with attitudes pissed Kennedy off.

  The sergeants’ test. The goddamned sergeants’ test. The New York Police Foundation, the black police brotherhood called The Guardian Society, the Chief of Patrol, the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, the Mayor’s Office, the Affirmative Action people, the good fairies, the little people, and the fucking Dallas Cowgirls had spent years trying to develop a civil-service test that did not discriminate against ethnic minorities, specifically against black recruiting candidates. The muscle for this program came from the 1980 federal court decision of Judge Robert Carter, who had ruled that not only did New York City discriminate against minorities, but that the bias was entirely intentional. Kennedy had no real argument against this. New York City is now, and always has been, a constellation of dark stars, warring factions, competing elements. Here in Harlem you had Spanish Harlem, Black Harlem, Puerto Rican Harlem, Italian Harlem, gang wars, turf struggles. The same thing went on all over the five boroughs. It even went on in the midtown area, in places such as the diamond district, where orthodox Jews had established a monopoly that not even the Mafia had been able to counter, and in Wall Street, where Harvard M.B.A.’s saw to it that nobody else got a Bass Weejun in the door without the high sign from a Phi Beta Crimson.

  Judge Carter had ruled that one out of every three new recruits should come from a minority, and that all subsequent promotions within the NYPD should accurately reflect this quota. The trouble was, one out of three minority members weren’t passing the tests. So, naturally, The Guardians, the brass at One Police Plaza, and the man from Gracie Mansion decided that rather than chase after a better class of recruit, perhaps by improving the inner-city school system, they would simply lower all the standards for getting into the Force.

  The idea seemed to be that if minorities weren’t getting past the recruiting standards, then the recruiting standards were at fault. Which, in Kennedy’s opinion, was partly true but not wholly true.

  Most of the experienced officers in the NYPD, including many of its blacks and Hispanics who had fought their way on to the force and up into the hierarchy the hard way, on the strength of their guts and their skill, felt that police work should not be treated like a democratic institution. The Police Force maintained order and enforced the laws of the land. This activity was not something the average senator or city councilperson could do. It required a basic set of physical, mental, and moral skills. If a recruit didn’t have the size, the education, or the moral character to do that job, then the recruit shouldn’t get the job.

  The clash came when the minorities pointed out, with some historical justification, that it was precisely that bit of reasoning that had kept the downtrodden down and trodden-upon for lo these many years.

  Kennedy’s father was an Irishman from Armagh. He knew the Troubles well, and he’d grown up at war with an occupying army that was a declared and ruthless oppressor, the Black and Tans, enforcers for the British occupation. Kennedy grew up hearing stories of the Irish revolt. The similarities between Belfast and Harlem were not lost on him. But the parallel broke down on the difference between Ireland and New York City. In spite of what many civil rights activists felt, Kennedy believed that the NYPD was not an occupying army, or the tool of a brutal regime. New York City was, in a cop’s world, a very tough town, with some extremely vicious people carrying on their businesses in it, and what a city like this needed wasn’t an ethnic hiring quota. It needed good cops.

  If you could get good ethnic cops, then as far as Kennedy, and most of the reasonable cops on the force, saw it, may God bless you. But don’t for Christ’s sake hire midgets, or twits, or cokeheads, or petty criminals, which had happened now that the prior criminal record of a recruit was not an automatic disqualification. Kennedy hated to see what had happened to th
e reputation of the NYPD in 1985. Like a lot of cops, he felt that the OEEO and Judge Carter’s ham-fisted approach to minority hiring had led directly to the disgrace of the Force. It had also led to the institution of outrages like the Internal Affairs Field Associates and their grab-bag entrapment war against the whole patrol and detective function. The brass at One Police Plaza didn’t trust the quality of recruit it was being forced to accept. They responded by hiring them, and then setting informers and spies at work among them. It was a lousy situation. Kennedy was hardly surprised that there was so much bitterness in men like Wolfgar Maksins.

  Funny thing was, Wolfie Maksins reminded Kennedy of his first partner, Al Weeks. Now there was a bitter man. Kennedy had gotten the guy as a partner mainly because nobody else with any pull at all would take the man on. Weeks liked to fight. If he wasn’t fighting with a punk or a psycho in the Bronx, he was quite ready to go after a fellow cop. He wanted only one thing: let the cop be white. He and Kennedy had their night on the roof of a tenement off Fordham. Hard to say what it was over. Kennedy just got tired of being called a mick, or a honky, or an ofay, or a faggot. Tired of being fucked over just because of the color of his skin. Afterward, they’d had a drink and a sweat at the police club. Weeks told him a few stories about being a black cop. Guy had a point. But.

  A friend of Kennedy’s who worked in the personnel office had sent him an OEEO internal report that showed black representation in the Detective Bureau, specifically in the gold-shield ratings, was averaging out at twelve percent, and even higher when the Detective Bureau lost nine hundred officers after the 1975 financial crisis—a very high average.

  Here in Harlem, and in the Bronx, Kennedy’s experience had led him to believe that people in need didn’t care very much about the color of a cop’s skin. What they did care about was the officer’s ability to do what they asked him to do.