by Adam Sommers
Arriving at the school, Eric found himself in front of a building that could have been plucked right off the streets of his old beat in Paterson, New Jersey—that is to say, it was a battered brick structure spray-painted with graffiti, missing windows, and stinking of urine where addicts and other assorted bums had peed in the doorways.
About fifty kids were outside milling around with several adults. The women with their arms draped over some child’s shoulder were almost certainly the moms; the others standing with arms crossed and scowls on their faces Eric pegged as teachers.
“Hey, can you tell me what happened?” Eric asked a woman who seemed like she might be in charge—only because she was complaining the loudest.
“Nothing happened!” she bellowed. “I don’t even know why all these people are here!” She nodded at the three police cars, two ambulances, and a fire truck. The crews from all of the above, numbering about twenty first responders, were lolling around outside the school killing time, hoping this would be the last call of their shifts. The girl who swallowed the pencil had long since been taken to the hospital simply as a precaution.
“The girl’s fine,” said the loud teacher, anticipating Eric’s next question. Kathy had stepped back and was busy shooting. “Don’t take my goddamn picture, you little bitch!”
“Public space, fair game,” Kathy told her and continued taking pictures. Kathy was tempted to take pictures of the cops and fire crews wasting the taxpayers’ dollars with their asses leaning against their rigs and cigarettes dangling from their mouths. But that would violate their unspoken agreement. Besides, the guys were not there doing “nothing,” exactly. Their presence—and the teacher-in-charge’s anger—stemmed from the same source: the fact that Southeast was a crime-ridden crap hole where something bad could happen at any moment. So if an ambulance was dispatched there, another was going as backup.
Backup for what?
For whatever.
And if there was a medical crew sent to Southeast, then a cop car was going to protect them. And cops never traveled alone, not in Southeast. There were at least two at every call.
Waste of resources?
Yes.
But those were the rules. Safety in numbers. Too bad if it made the residents feel like they lived in a war zone. They did.
“Daaaaaaaa!”
Eric turned around just in time to see a Hispanic man thrust both arms straight out in front of him, fists clenched so tightly it looked like his skin would rip. His eyes rolled back in his head and his body went rigid before he fell flat on his back as if he were an I-beam.
Eric ducked, thinking the man must have been shot.
Two paramedics brushed past him, but didn’t seem to be in a hurry. This surprised Eric Berger, who thought he’d just witnessed a murder.
The first medic, the heavier of the two, stuck a wooden stick in the stricken man’s mouth while the other began taking his pulse.
“Is he dead?” asked Eric.
“No,” chuckled the smaller of the two medics. “He’s just fine.”
“Fine?”
“It’s alcohol shock,” said the other. “Sometimes they drink too much too fast and their muscles seize. An hour from now he’ll be joking about it.”
Kathy Drass, who had been snapping away viciously at the man on the ground, suddenly lost interest. “Any sign of the girl?” she asked Eric as the medical crew cracked open a couple of smelling salts and slapped the man’s face.
“Said they took her to St. Jude’s.”
“Ch-ching, ch-ching, ch-ching.”
“What do you mean, ch-ching?”
“Nothing. It’s just all part of the big scam. They’ll charge the mom two-hundred for the ambulance ride. The E.R. will charge her another $500, and she’ll get an assload of meds she probably won’t need.”
“Oh.”
“They’ll ring up a couple of grand before they’re done, but these folks don’t have insurance and they can’t possibly pay for it.”
“So how is it a scam?”
“They’ll bill Medicaid.”
“Oh.”
“Our tax dollars at work.”
Eric scuffled the dirt, looked around at the nearly static scene. Kathy Drass followed his gaze around but didn’t offer any comment. Finally, after a minute or two, Eric observed, “Doesn’t seem to be much of a story for us here.”
“Nah,” agreed Kathy. “It’s pretty beat. Got a nice shot of the guy going down, but it’s not much of a story. Probably I’ll just print it and put it in my scrapbook.”
“What am I going to write about?”
“I dunno. What kind of shape is the kid in?”
“She’s okay. Least says the lady over there.”
“Mmm, tough to go back to the barn with a goose egg your first shot out of the gate,” Kathy said with just a trace of sympathy in her voice. “Come with me. I might know someone who could help.”
Kathy led Eric to where the cops were huddled up by the Emergency Service Unit van. She leaned in, gave the cop on the far left a big hug and kiss. “Ollie.”
“Beautiful.”
The hug went on for several seconds before Kathy pulled away. “Ollie Lynch, this is Eric Berger. He’s new.”
“Berger,” said the big cop and shook Eric’s white-collar hand in his beefy paw, then turned his full attention to Kathy Drass, grabbing ahold of her hand and murmuring something Eric couldn’t quite catch even though he was only a few feet away. Whatever it was, it was enough for Kathy to discard, at least for the moment, any inclination she had recently felt to help Eric find a story.
The other cops had turned their attention to each other and Eric took a couple of steps back away from the group. He felt awkward and out of place. It was rude of her, Eric thought, to make him think the cop would have a story then completely shut him out. But what did he know? Kathy Drass seemed okay, but he didn’t know her at all. She could be a wack job or just ditzy. Being new sucked.
He thought about trying to chat up the other officers, but they looked like a tight bunch gossiping away in their little huddle, and he didn’t want to be weird and intrude. On the other hand, he did not want to go back to the newspaper office with nothing to say other than that a teacher had pulled a small bit of pencil out of some girl’s throat. At best it would be a two-inch box on some page in the back.
Maybe the story, Eric thought, could be all the emergency personnel called out for nothing. But he dismissed that idea even before he finished thinking it because if he was going to get anywhere in this new job, the first thing he needed to do was make friends with the cops.
“New guy.” It was the big cop, Ollie, that Kathy had been intensely talking to. Eric, surprised, took a few steps forward. Whatever issue or crisis they were engrossed in seemed to be over and they resumed paying attention to the rest of the world.
“Where ya from?”
“Jersey.”
“Jersey, huh? Stinks in Jersey, doesn’t it?”
Parts of it stink, that much was true, Eric admitted to himself. “Stinks here, too,” he said out loud.
Ollie Lynch flinched in surprise and chuckled at the sass from the kid reporter, but looking around he had to admit, “Mmm, yeah, stinks a little, but not like Jersey. That state has its own trademark brand of stink. I know—my sister lives in Linden.”
“My sympathies to your sister.”
The cop laughed.
The ice now definitely broken, Eric turned to the subject at hand. “The girl’s okay, yeah?”
“Shit, yeah.”
“Great. What the hell am I supposed to write about?”
The cop shrugged. Not his problem.
Before Ollie Lynch could respond, another officer jumped in. “You could write about these two.”
“Who?”
“Ollie a
nd his fiancee, your photographer.”
“Oh, fiancee?”
“Yeah, gonna get married.”
“Serious?”
“Yeah,” Ollie Lynch confirmed, turning red in embarrassment. “Thanks for your big mouth, Patty.”
“Awesome. That’s great,” Eric chirped enthusiastically.
Kathy looked down, clearly she did not want this information released in public, especially to someone she had met only an hour ago. “You don’t have to go broadcasting everything to everyone,” she scolded Ollie, but also Patty Menendez, who had spilled the beans.
“Sorry, Kath,” Ollie Lynch tried to apologize for both him and his cop friend. “But really it’s not such a big deal. We got a date. People are gonna know anyway.”
“The big deal is I want to tell people my own way, my own time. Understand?”
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?”
And that set them off bickering, once again losing interest in him, his problems and everyone else for that matter.
Pat Menendez, thankfully, came to Eric’s rescue. “Don’t pay any attention to those two.”
Eric looked over happy to have someone to talk to, even though Menendez had been the one to instigate the tensions. “They’ve been at it for like nine years off and on.”
“Look like a sweet couple. When’s the big day?” Eric wasn’t great at small talk.
“Sometime this winter I think,” he said. “Who knows? They run hot and cold. Love each other, can’t stand each other. Frankly, we’re all sick of it and wish they’d shit or get off the pot already.”
“Yeah,” Eric offered. “But unless they murder each other, I still don’t have anything to write about.”
Menendez smiled at that. “Don’t think I can help you.”
“Okay.” Eric would be happy to bail and look for something else, or head back to the office and maybe catch another story, but Kathy was driving, and he wasn’t going to walk six miles through ghetto Washington to the office, so he was more or less at her mercy. He tried to catch her eye and give her the look that said “let’s be on our way,” but, if anything, the conversation she was having with Ollie Lynch became even more animated.
What could Eric Berger do? He had no cred, no history here, and there was no reason for anyone to stick their neck out for him. Other than the fact that he was cute in a helpless-kitten kind of way, he had nothing at all to hang his hopes on.
Finally, after what must have been twenty or thirty minutes, Kathy broke free of Ollie, with her face and body language screaming anything but love and affection, and stepped over to Eric. “Sorry,” she offered and, to Eric’s surprise, really meant it.
“It’s okay. We have nothing anyway.”
“Don’t quit so easy. These guys always know something. C’mon, Ollie, spill. You got some juice. Let’s have it.”
“Yeah, Ollie, don’t you have something,” Pat Menendez mocked, and made a kissy face.
“I got something for YOU, Patty,” said Ollie and grabbed his groin.
“I gave that same thing to your mom last night,” Menendez fired back.
“That’s pretty funny for a guy who got his start in the Mounted Unit, you know, where you got your unit mounted.”
The other crew members laughed at that.
Menendez couldn’t think of anything to shoot back, so he fumed and looked around in desperation until his eyes lit on Eric. “Hey, you aren’t going to put that in the paper are you?” he joked.
“What?” Eric deadpanned, “that a Metro cop fucks horses?”
That stopped the chatter as if a switch had been thrown and they all turned to stare at him. So did Kathy Drass. But Eric wasn’t done. “Hell, half the cops on the force probably joined up just so they could fuck the finest horses in Washington,” he added grinning.
The twenty or so uniformed first responders let their mouths hang open in astonishment. Had this new little shit just called half the police department a bunch of horse-fuckers? Really?
Then the big cop Ollie’s big round face exploded with spittle coming out his mouth and snot from his nose. He laughed so hard it sounded like a shriek. Instantly, the other dominoes fell, and they were all busting their guts.
“Shit, Kath,” Ollie said when he caught his breath. “You didn’t tell me New Guy was cool.”
“I had no idea,” Kathy Drass whispered more to herself than to Ollie or anyone else. “Now, do you have something for him or not?”
“Why can’t he check the blotter like everyone else?”
“Either you have something or you don’t. If you don’t have anything, then he has to start asking questions, that’s what he gets paid to do. And he might start asking questions about why all these Metro PD cops and medics and shit are sitting around watching nothing when there’s a crack murder about every five minutes, and a lot of them right around here.”
“For fuck’s sake, calm down. You don’t always have to go flying off the handle.”
“I wouldn’t fly off the handle if you weren’t always such an asshole and hanging out with all these asshole friends, with your big mouths and girly-girl gossip.”
“I already said I was sorry. I didn’t think…”
“Hey, you could give him the leg guy from last night.” It was the voice of someone new from the mob of uniforms.
“Awch, yeah. That was just gross,” said Ollie, glad to shift the focus onto anything that would save him from another tongue-lashing from his girlfriend.
Chapter 7
Dear Arnold:
Once again I find myself apologizing to you. Ironic, isn’t it? I’m apologizing for apologizing. How pathetic. But I could not bring myself to look you in the eye and say goodbye. I feel so incredibly weak. I’m such a complete lame-ass.
How many times during the past few years have I started to call, started to write, only to sit back down and do nothing, but stare out into nothing and wonder why this has crippled me so badly?
Arnold McNeill’s breath caught in his throat, and he saw drops of water hit the paper before he realized he was crying.
Even though I understand on an intellectual level that neither you nor I nor the others did anything wrong, at least nothing to deserve what happened, I’ve still found it hard to live with the shame. I never took any joy from the fact that I have been able to live well. I’ve never been able to get or hold a job. I can’t stand to be in an office. I remember when I did like to work. I was good at it. I could write. I could hustle. I should have had a future.
But what happens happens. Sometimes there are catastrophes we can’t survive. My greatest regret was that it was your name and not mine on the record. It shows what we’ve both always known right from when we started in Baltimore, you have more guts. You showed that throughout, you probably show it still to this day.
We only find out who we really are when we come face to face with our monsters. I found out I’m not a person I like very much. If I weren’t such a weak-willed doormat, none of this would have happened. I could have stopped her at the beginning, nipped it in the bud, to use a cliche. But I didn’t. And now it is the end. I am sorry. Contact Stanley, he will see to it that you take ownership of all that I have, if you want it. Be well.
Tony.
Arnold crumpled the paper and squeezed it against his face, smashing it into his eyes, feeling the sharp edges scratch his lids. “Oh, Tony,” he moaned, and sat there for a minute or two trying to imagine that the paper could absorb pain as well as it did tears. In a few minutes, the storm passed, and he regained his composure. Arnold straightened out the letter and laid it on the glass table so that it would dry. It only took a few minutes, and he was glad to see he could still read the words even if a few of them had been smeared. Next, he took down from his packed bookshelf a heavy reference volume and slipped the letter between two pages toward the
middle. Here it would be safe and maybe, over time, some of the wrinkles would be smoothed.
He hoped that would be the end of it, that he could store his feelings and memories as easily as the letter. But even though he knew what happened, he could not resist the need to get it confirmed. With trepidation, he called the Macon, Georgia, medical examiner’s office and asked if they had any information on his friend.
The clerk was able to retrieve the file in a few minutes. There was no reason not to share the contents. It was public information, and the subject was deceased.
The clerk read the top of the info sheet: “Decedent: Sclafani, Anthony T.; age: 31; date of death: April 17, 1990; time of death: 4:17 a.m.; cause of death: gunshot wound, self-inflicted. “Ah am sahry,” said the clerk in a heavy accent.
“It’s not your fault, but thank you,” said Arnold.
Chapter 8
“Oh?” Eric Berger’s ears perked up. “I like gross. Gross could be good.” He thought back to the very first story he had done for the Paterson News. A worker at an acetylene company died when a tank exploded during a transfer operation. The worker had been in a yard enclosed by cyclone fencing, and the force of the impact sent him into the fencing so hard that it had bent the steel support poles. When Eric arrived, he didn’t know what had happened and he asked a cop, who pointed to where what looked like a pile of dirty laundry lay at the bottom of the ruined fence. That was Eric Berger’s first dead body.
For the Metro cops, telling Eric about the leg guy was easy. It wasn’t even really their story. It was an EMS story, plus no one did anything wrong, so no one could get in trouble. If it got him back in Kathy’s good graces, Ollie Lynch was happy to share.
“We came up on a crash last night in Darenton. It’s like 11:30, so it’s not that late. Medics got the guy on the gurney and they’re loading him in. Seems pretty standard. Then I saw Pegasus, that big Indian guy from Sloamy, and he’s looking all around like he’s lost something. I said, ‘Peg, what?’ It looked to me like he was pretty wound up about whatever it was he was looking for. I said to myself it has to be something expensive. His defib or BP cuff, or I don’t know what.