The Policeman's Daughter

by Trudy Nan Boyce

  The girl, her words, the tight braids. Salt ran her fingers through her hair. The scab wouldn’t come unstuck, though she kept worrying it. Then with a sudden rush of guilt she remembered: Mother’s Day. She thought about calling her mother, who still didn’t know she had been shot. She thought about the last phone call. “Are you enjoying the Crock-Pot we sent for your birthday? I use mine all the time. Jake loves a roast cooked slow. I’m getting our kitchen painted over. John and Susan took the boys over to the beach. Do you see your friends from college? Are you keeping your doors locked? Mr. Gooden told us he would look out for you.”

  “Mom, I’m a cop. I look out for Mr. Gooden. He’s eighty years old,” she had said, speaking of her next-door neighbor. He and his deceased wife, Peggy, had known her family for generations.

  “You don’t need to remind me that you’re a cop.”

  “No, Ma, I’m sorry. I know you worry. It’s just. Well, I love you guys, too. Tell John, Susan, and the boys hello.”

  “Those boys are so cute. You should see them in the pool.”

  “Mom, I love you.”

  “Why don’t you come visit?”

  “I will. I will,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t. “Best to Jake.”

  The gurney was being lowered down the steep, shaky iron stairs. Because of the rigor, Shannell’s body made the cloth cover stick out in the wrong places. Just like Shannell, Salt thought.

  The detectives talked to Lil D. Gardner went over to Sister’s house and after getting from the girl that Lil D hadn’t been in the apartment when she found Shannell, they cut him loose. Wills told her Shannell’s daughter’s name was Mary Marie McCloud.

  Walking back to their cars, Salt asked Pepper, “Did you get your mom and Ann something for Mother’s Day?”

  “Roses for Mom and tulips for my sweetie.”

  “I need to go to the precinct for a minute. Can you cover my calls?”

  “You feeling okay? Your head bothering you?”

  “I’m okay. I’ll catch you in a few.”

  Milking the Shannell-is-down call, Salt drove behind the old stone church, parked, and turned on her phone. She reached her mother’s recorded voice and left a message. “Hi, Mom, it’s Salt, Sarah.” Her voice tightened. “Mom, I’m at work but I didn’t want you to think I forgot you today.” Her voice felt strained, thinning out. “Mom, happy Mother’s Day,” she said, trying to mask the relief she felt to be talking to the machine that asked no questions and made no comments.

  She laid her head on the steering wheel and let the memory come—of her own discovery of a dead parent, her tenth birthday, left with her father while her mother and brother went to get the trappings for the celebration.

  She sat for a minute, then turned on the car and the wipers. The night had come on, accompanied by a pre-rain foggy mist. Waiting for the window to clear, Salt pushed back the image of trying to clear the blood from her father’s eyes and mouth. She struggled to remember something about boards, another memory snagged by the broken door on Shannell’s apartment. The patrol car windows were clear enough now, she just wished she had a way to clear the cloudy flecks from her eyes. She put the car in gear, hoping to catch a break between calls so she could go look for Big D. And she needed to find Lil D and ask him to pump the street for anything that would lead to who had killed Shannell. Homicide would do their job, but murders on Marcy Street just wouldn’t get the same attention from the detectives as a murder on the north side.

  She prayed softly to Shannell. “Your daughter didn’t forget. She came to find you.”

  8.

  THE WAR ZONE AND LIL D

  Salt pulled into the precinct parking lot ready for the Friday night fights and found the whole shift leaning against their cars, trying to act casual, all early. They cut their eyes to her and looked quickly away. Then she saw her beat car. The big white cruiser was covered in gauze, thin cotton strips wrapped the tires, trailed like streamers from the windshield wipers, flew like banners from the antennas. On the driver’s-side door, taped across the city emblem, was a sign that read DUCK DOES NOT MEAN LOOK UP! Salt got out of her Honda, walked over to the decorated car, and in full uniform, boots, hat, gun belt, radio, and baton, put one foot on the push bumper, hoisted herself to the hood, and assumed a calendar-girl pose. The pain in her head rattled slightly, then settled. “I wondered when you guys would start in on me.” She laughed. You knew you were loved when they made jokes about your misfortune. Pepper grabbed his phone and took the picture, all the guys behind her, making faces, telling her to say “duck” instead of “cheese.” The photo showed her sitting atop the bandaged car, the crease of a scar running through the dark beginnings of her newly grown curls.

  * * *

  • • •

  Officers got worn out, baffled, and scared but never, ever bored. But it was frustrating to pass by the drug dealers night after night, the PD without enough resources to clean up the problem areas, the war on drugs a joke. Some nights officers would ask other officers to cover for them, stealing time while they tried to identify the players and how they ran the dope traps, their efforts quixotic attempts to gather enough information to either pass on to Narcotics detectives or obtain enough probable cause to get their own warrants.

  Before roll call was over, radio was already asking for units to pull in for calls. Salt didn’t bother to unbandage her car. She just rolled out of the precinct, trailing gauze. Another sign on the trunk read JUST RECOVERED.

  * * *

  • • •

  She handled several calls. On one domestic some kids had unbandaged her car while she made peace. Then Salt drove to an alley parallel with the front row of some project buildings. Occupied units alternated with the unoccupied and vandalized. Windows were dressed in broken shards. She got a pair of binoculars from her gear bag, hung them around her neck, got out, and started down a dark path. Watching for gang members and dopers who could run to tell the dealers she was in the area on foot, she tried to stay in the shadows. The old-fashioned word ambush came to mind as she put her hands over the silver buttons and badge on her shirt to cut down reflections. “Radio, hold me out on foot in the area of 222 Moury,” she whispered into the radio mic. The shift would be listening, nervous until she came on radio and advised she was back in her car. Pepper had agreed to try to catch her calls while she was out.

  As she watched for the gang, a sizzling awareness of shapes, shadows, and movement sang in her veins like she thought meth might feel. She switched off the radio.

  On the rutted and gullied downhill to the abandoned, burned-out apartment, aware of the rubble, she was careful with her footing. Glinting liquor bottle glass crunched under the tread of her heavy work shoes. Rotting boards that had been used to seal the doors and windows of the stripped and vandalized building were lying in the grass, as they had been for the last year. Vacant units were supposed to be sealed to protect them from thieves and to keep children out. But as soon as the boards went up they came down.

  Salt had often used this place to watch the drug transactions across the street at the corner walk-up food shop. Careful to avoid the condoms and human feces that littered the concrete floor, she stepped from the doorway to the broken window facing the street. Lifting the binoculars, she focused, bringing the players, surrounded by a yellow haze from the streetlights on the corner, into view. Man-Man and Johnny C, light-skinned brothers, handsome in red jerseys; heavyset Bootie Green; skinny and quick Lil D and Half-Dead; and Q-Ball with his shiny head. All the usual gang members except Stone were running the trap tonight. She scanned the shadows, hoping to locate Stone leaning against some corner or sitting in a car. He’d get her vote for most dangerous. Sometimes he’d walk up close to her on calls, staring and crossing the line into a scene. He gave her hard looks, constantly challenging with an unspoken threat, and had recently pointed his finger at her and mimed pulling the trigger. Searching an
d not finding him in the lens of the binoculars, she became aware of a breeze on the back of her neck. Propped on the sill of the window, viewing the action, left her back exposed to the doorless entry. She counted on the bits of glass on the floor to serve as warning. Her ears were on hyper-alert.

  Lil D moved into focus. He was wearing fresh new clothes, maybe he’d moved up in the gang. Mainly he’d just held and done hand-to-hands, usually in the same baggy jeans, shorts, orange jersey, and worn sneakers. He was wearing shiny black-and-red shorts, a matching jersey, number 38—police code for drugs—and new sneakers, two-hundred-dollar red flashers, presenting him as an equal, mid-level in the drug gang chain. Salt sat back, waited, watching.

  Nine years ago Lil D had been living with his grandmother, his father’s mother, Mrs. Mobley, in The Homes, the largest part of Salt’s then new beat. She had gotten a domestic disturbance to Mrs. Mobley’s apartment and when she got there Lil D was bad-mouthing his grandmother, whose apartment was a known shot house, where illegal booze by the glass and loose cigarettes were sold. Card games and gambling were other sidelines and the two-bedroom apartment was almost always a chaotic place filled with people trying to numb some kind of misery.

  That call wasn’t the first Salt had gotten involving Lil D fighting with Mrs. Mobley. For several weeks radio had kept sending her to respond to either the grandmother or Lil D or someone calling 911 about their back-and-forths. But that day was different. Lil D, there on the stoop, with the towel around his neck, tired and scared, wasn’t a hard case yet. He seemed to Salt to hold a recognizable hope for some adult to give him a childhood, that day struggling to swallow, trying to be angry so he wouldn’t cry, afraid to trust one more person. She took his despair hard. She had needed to believe a kid from The Homes could make it, could have a real childhood. So she jumped at the first idea that came to her. To buy the time she thought she’d need to get him help or to find a program, Lil D would have to go to Juvenile lockup. She explained that he would have to be arrested, that a placement could be found for him from Juvenile. As they talked he began to look more at her and less toward the apartment, away from his grandmother’s and the pressure to work the Avenue and toward the possibility of escape by arrest.

  “I got to get locked up so I can get what?”

  “I’m going to make some calls, get you in a program, a group home, maybe good foster care. Get some recommendations to the judge.”

  He looked back at his grandmother’s, then shrugged. “Anything would be better than tryin’ to stay here. Looks like I got no choice.”

  “Come on. I’ll charge you with a hummy, a bullshit charge,” Salt had told him. “Call me a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “Call me a bitch.”

  “You want me to call you a bitch?”

  “You have to so I can take you to juvenile. You have to commit a crime. Call me a bitch.”

  “Bitch,” he said flatly, then sniffed and wiped his nose.

  The next day Reverend Bradford’s voice dripped with world-weary heaviness, delivering a “No Room at the Inn” speech that sounded rote. It was the same with all the other contacts and agencies Salt called. Any program had a wait of at least thirty days. Refusing to give up, Salt went back to Juvenile on her lunch minutes, between calls, hoping they would hold Lil D until a spot opened up, only to find that an anonymous caseworker had disregarded her request to contact her before releasing him. Big D had been allowed to get his son and take him back to The Homes, his grandmother’s liquor house, and the street.

  It wasn’t like she’d given up; she kept asking, kept knocking on the doors of the system. Lil D and his family were bound, brick and bone, mortar and marrow, with and by The Homes. Every encounter with Lil D since, he’d look away, move away, or spit on the street and put on a street face. Lil D and Salt, nine years.

  Through the jumpy, jittery binocular view she focused on him, all these hard years later, now selling on the Avenue full time. It was difficult to hold a steady image with the powerful binoculars. Any slight movement on her part caused ghosts to run through the focus and people to jiggle around unnaturally. His features in a blur, Lil D could have been his mother. He’d never grown much taller than the five five he had been as a fourteen-year-old, still rail thin, but the scared kid was locked beneath the hard lines of his face. He cocked his chin defiantly, his eyes hooded, his mouth puckered in a permanent scowl, a study in street-tough anger. The birthmark was barely visible in the shifting focus.

  He leaned against the dingy white bricks of Sam’s Chicken Shack with one foot propped behind him. A dark blue sedan pulled into the parking lot and stopped near Bootie Green, tonight’s deal man, who gave a nod to Lil D. Lil D pumped himself off the wall, going to get the product from behind the food joint.

  Nearby, a decked-out yellow low-rider truck shimmied with bass beats as Lil D sauntered around the building. He was at the back side of the building for about twenty seconds and returned with a cool walk, arms dangling, fingers loose, except the thumb of his right hand was tucked into his palm. He went over to Green. Arms touching, they leaned together into the open window of the dark sedan.

  Green and Lil D backed away and returned to their positions, the thunk, thunk of the low-rider vibrating the prismed light of the corner, the blue sedan rolling out of the lot.

  The Ghetto Girls Gang, with their neon-red and blond hairdos, shook into the scene, pretending to ignore the come-on calls of the corner boys. Salt heard glass crunch. She slid from the window to avoid backlighting from the street. Weighing the risk, she’d turned off her two-way so that the radio traffic wouldn’t give her away. She waited in a squat. Two figures stumbled into the door. The couple didn’t see her as they went past into the next room, probably searching for a mattress and a safe place to share a pipe. Salt breathed and quickly stepped out of the apartment, back onto the path, and back up the hill toward her car thirty or so yards away.

  Illuminated by the streetlight, Stone sat on the hood of her black-and-white, his bony shoulders curved in toward the cigar he was lighting. His profile was instantly recognizable. In addition to the winglike shoulders, his head was very round and too small for his build. Sitting on her car was an arrogant street insult. Salt switched the radio back on: “3306 to radio. Can any unit meet me at Moury and Thirkeld?” Stone knew the rules and was challenging her again, both of them knowing how long it would likely take for another cop to get there.

  Stone’s white T-shirt was loose, plenty of room to conceal.

  Salt continued up the hill, knowing that to stop or back off would concede Stone ownership of territory. It felt like a clichéd confrontation from a movie, but she could not afford concessions.

  Careful of the language of the street, the moves, she didn’t draw any weapon but surreptitiously unsnapped gas and gun.

  There were no private moments in these streets. Someone always passed the word. Someone could always testify.

  “Get off the car,” she said, moving in, giving him fair notice.

  Stone pretended to be listening to the loud rap from the corner, kicking his leg to the beat, keeping time, and mouthing the words Fuck the police. Fuck the police. His cheekbones shone in the light, making it hard to tell whether his eyes were open or closed.

  “Off the car,” she repeated at the curb. She came around the trunk.

  He lifted his chin, ignoring her, looking away down the street.

  He’s caught in his own game, she thought.

  He propped himself, stiff armed, leaning on his hands.

  Her hands were free. There were gunshots in the distance.

  He pushed off, slid his bone-and-muscle body from the hood.

  She touched leather.

  He brought his left hand up. His right touched the hem of his T-shirt. He pointed his left barrel finger, keeping it trained on her while he slipped past the streetlight circle into the
shadows of the building.

  * * *

  • • •

  Stone must have passed the word because the boys on the corner were ignoring both the walk-up customers and the cars pulling into the lot looking to score. She stopped her cruiser in the chicken place parking lot, close to where Lil D was standing. He watched her arrival, then turned his face and, as he often did in front of his boys, spit on the pavement. Salt got out and stood there until she was sure everybody on the corner had noticed, and was paying some kind of attention. So many people out on this warm summer night, a kind of insurance. There was plenty of light from the food shop and the streetlights. Mr. George, sitting on the curb nearby, nodded slightly. She had delivered his grandchild when his daughter went into premature labor last year. Sitting on the curb beside him was Crazy Sue, who counted on Salt to get her to the city hospital when her medication ran out or just didn’t work anymore. There were enough people here, maybe not to stop a bullet, but to at least drop a dime, to bear witness that she was doing her job, occasionally interrupting the dope traffic for a minute, messing with the gang. She walked, still cautious, to the back of the building where from her vantage point across the street she had seen Lil D go to get the single rocks for the buyers.

  She stood behind the dirty cinder-block building for a few seconds, kicked at food bags and take-out boxes, knowing that there were too many places to conceal dope for her to find the stash. After a few more seconds, enough for a show, at random she picked up a paper sack and walked to the front of the store. The rest of the gang was drifting off, but the stash was Lil D’s responsibility tonight and he couldn’t leave it or the geek heads would steal it before he got back. Lil D, of course, would know what kind of container the crack was concealed in, so he wasn’t particularly worried when Salt came back around holding the brown bag. But the fact that she had some kind of bag caused him to grow watchful and less casual. He dropped his foot from the wall and fell away from his leaning spot, less cool, now not trying to ignore her.