Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Neighbors say?”

  “Neighbors say.”

  “OK.”

  “Neighbors say…they had been known to quarrel.”

  “OK. Police won’t confirm?”

  “Not… I have an ongoing dialogue with the detective here, but no, not yet.”

  “So the kid’s gonna make it?”

  “Well, he was crying, right? So I guess so.”

  “Grandma too?”

  “Don’t know yet. So what else is going on?”

  “Forty-four Forest in Gannon, a shooting. Sounds like one friend shooting the other.”

  “Gators?”

  “Don’t know, it’s pretty fresh. Hang on…Here we go. Fifteen-year-old male, thirteen-year-old male.”

  “Who shot who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What, playing with the father’s gun, showing off?”

  “Wait up, here we go. Fifteen shooting thirteen and…It’s a graze wound. Fuck it.”

  “Maybe it’s a brother act.”

  “They’re under sixteen. We couldn’t use the names anyhow.”

  “What else…”

  That was Jesse’s theme song. Jesse was the type of journalist known as a runner, a stick-and-move artist covering the six incorporated cities and towns of Dempsy County, living off the police scanner, hitting the scene, getting the names, a few quotes, a little local color, dumping all of it into a cell phone to Jose or someone in rewrite, and then asking what else was going down out there—perpetually asking what else.

  She could have as many as two or three bylines a day, but the price she paid was that the pieces would rarely read deeper than a snapshot.

  “What else, Jose.”

  “We got a possible carjack in Strongarm.”

  “I was just there.”

  “Female being treated at DMC.”

  “Black or white?”

  “Don’t know. Fuck it, never mind.”

  “What else?”

  “What else.” Jose paused for dramatic effect. “Someone hit the Dutchman.”

  “There you go.”

  Impatient to roll, Jesse hit the car horn. Halfway down the block, Ben, still on the phone, gestured for five more minutes and she had no choice but to hang in, respecting the fact that, although her brother’s money gigs could come in at any hour and at a moment’s notice, they also tended to run in a pattern of feast or famine.

  Having grown up as two moving targets, brother and sister had both developed an unconscious lifelong commitment to staying light on their feet. Jesse converted journalism into a track-and-field event, and Ben became what he called a “freelance expediter,” a top-of-the-line odd-job man, intelligent and temperamentally stable enough to do anything, night or day, in light or in shadow.

  As she restlessly watched her brother pacing under a streetlight, Jesse had no clue as to whom he was speaking with, the nature of the work involved, or the amount of compensation. She was reasonably sure that he would be paid either in cash or in goods, since Ben had no charge cards, no bank account, and most likely no Social Security number.

  The Dutchman was fifteen feet tall and bronze, standing there in front of City Hall since 1904, clutching his deed and musket, goateed, potbellied, and stern. His seventeenth-century big-buttoned tunic and breeches made him look vaguely like Oliver Hardy in Babes in Toyland.

  His name was Jan De Groot, and he was the first settler of record in what was to become Dempsy County. For the last ninety-odd years, De Groot’s gaze had been directed straight down Division Street. But tonight he seemed to be scoping out the midblock 7-Eleven. The Coptic Egyptians who worked there were standing in the doorway staring right back.

  The Buick that had knocked the Dutchman off-kilter was still on the scene, its grille crumpled against his big bronze ass. The driver, a gaunt middle-aged man sporting a thin pompadour and glasses, leaned against his passenger door, arms folded across his chest, looking both miserable and utterly alone.

  On the ride over, Jose had called back to tell Jesse that the car was supposed to have been driven by someone high up in City Hall, someone drunk, and that the statue had been knocked over, but she could tell from twenty feet away that this guy was stone sober. He projected more the harried and downtrodden air of a ticket taker at a multiplex than that of any kind of political player. Apparently the police had already come and gone and the poor bastard was just waiting on a Triple-A tow truck. This was a total bullshit run and Jesse was pissed.

  “What happened?” She slammed the door of the Chrysler, making her brother flinch and approached the scene of the crime with that look and tone of personal dismay that she always used for openers.

  The guy’s first reaction was to move toward her, as if Jesse were here to rescue him, but then he saw the notepad and wound up simply sinking back into himself, seeming, if possible, twice as dejected as before.

  “What the hell did you do to the Dutchman?” Jesse squawked, keeping it light.

  “Aw, now see, you’re putting me on the spot,” he said, shaking his head, talking to his shoes.

  “What do you mean?” Jesse eyed the pedestal, the statue having pivoted maybe six inches to the left—big fucking deal.

  “You wouldn’t want me to put you on the spot, would you?” He sounded nervous, in unfamiliar terrain.

  “Somebody said they saw beer cans rolling around in there.” She nodded to the car.

  “How can they see the floor of my car? I’m driving.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Rising from the Chrysler, Ben lumbered toward the scene. The driver eyed him apprehensively giving Jesse the impression that if her brother announced he was here to take him off to jail the guy would go without protest.

  “You weren’t a little bozoed?”

  “The accelerator got stuck.” He stepped away from the car. “Look for yourself. I don’t even drink coffee, I swear.”

  Jesse took him up on it, opening the rear door, seeing nothing in there but some unused envelopes with a Board of Education return address. Bullshit. Jesse wanted to go, move on.

  When she straightened up, she saw her brother squatting in front of the Dutchman surveying the damage, as if he were about to pull a Hercules here and realign the statue with his bare hands.

  “So what’s your name?” she asked.

  “I can’t really say.” The driver hugged himself again.

  “You don’t know your name?” Jesse said, experiencing a wave of fatigue.

  “See, there you go, putting me on the spot again.”

  “C’mon, I’ll make you famous.”

  “I don’t want to be famous.”

  “Everybody wants to be famous.”

  “No.”

  “The girls’ll go crazy.”

  “No. I’m too old.”

  “Nobody’s too old. What’s your name?”

  “No.”

  “You work for the Board of Education?”

  Emitting a loud, fluttery sigh, he got back into his car, locked the door, reached for the air conditioner, realized the engine was off, turned the ignition. The car refused to kick over, so he just sat there sweating, staring straight ahead.

  Hoisting up the knees of his pants, Ben actually tried to slide the statue back to its original position. Jesse watched him, marveling at his every-ready willingness to pitch in, wherever he went.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped. “Are you brain-damaged?”

  Exasperated, Jesse walked back to the Chrysler, to the cell phone. Her brother, unable to move the Dutchman, was now trying to pop this poor mope’s hood, pinpoint the problem. Momentarily comforted by the plush and musk of big-car leather, Jesse closed her eyes and brailled her way over the phone to the paper.

  “Yo.”

  “Jose.” His name was as natural in her mouth as a cough.

  “Yo.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was an accident.”

&nbs
p; “Drunk?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “Won’t give his name. Nobody.”

  “I want a picture. Wait for the photographer.”

  “Aw, c’mon, what are you gonna do, shoot the statue’s left foot?”

  “It’s the Dutchman.”

  “He’s still standing. What else you got?”

  “Still got that Strongarm carjack.”

  “What else.”

  “Hold on… 125 Division Street. Over in Tunnely. Got a body.”

  The body was a stinking, gas-filled balloon yielding neither sex nor race, the skin marbled, stretched taut, the color of smoke. There was no trouble getting past the door on this one, since the two uniforms charged with preserving the scene were almost grateful for company and Jesse had known one of them from back in the day.

  The cops, Jerry Bohannon and Tony she thought, Siragusa, had lit some incense they had found on a desktop next to the burned spoon—maybe a dozen sticks jammed into the door frame and around the bed—but it was a basement apartment, the sole window halfway below street level, and the scented smoke only added a sweetish element to the overall stench.

  “Live by the spike, die by the spike,” announced Jerry Bohannon, a milk-white Irishman with a pale, almost transparent moustache. He was gesturing to the needle still stuck in the left forearm.

  “No ID?” Jesse asked, exhaling through her mouth to avoid the smell. “Jesus.”

  “The old lady upstairs, I guess she owns the house. She’s not home, but the shoes tell me it’s a him.”

  “As does the ’stache,” Siragusa added, holding his nose as he leaned over the body. “Hair’s kind of straight, so I’d say white, Hispanic.”

  “I don’t want to start going through his shit,” Bohannon said. “Wait for Crime Scenes.”

  Jesse looked around the bedroom, fairly neat for an overdose: some old pop-culture stuff lying around, airplane models, World’s Fair buttons, a Howdy Doody doll hanging from a noose, some Mad magazines from the sixties, the body something of a nostalgia buff. She wandered into the bathroom: a mildewed shower curtain, a stack of fuck books on one side of the toilet and a kitty litter tray, soiled, on the other. Quickly, quietly, she opened the medicine chest, trying to find a name on a prescription bottle. A vial of Fiorinal gave up Michael Jackson, Jesse thinking, Good one.

  There was another room, an eat-in kitchenette with nicer shelves and surfaces than those in her own. She grunted distractedly, wheels turning. One of the perks for a runner was occasionally getting to know, before anyone else, that an apartment was about to go on the market.

  “You see a cat around here?” Jesse asked, reentering the bedroom. The cops were sharing a cigar now, to further mask the smell, Bohannon using his cupped palm as an ashtray.

  “A cat?” Siragusa said.

  “What do you think he pays here?” Jesse asked.

  “Rent?” Bohannon made a face. “Three, four hundred?”

  “I’d say four, five,” Siragusa said.

  “Yeah, huh?” Jesse looked around again. She’d miss the view of the river, but she could be alone.

  “Jess.” Bohannon offered her the cigar, which she declined. “If you’re thinking about making a move on this, you should go for it, like, now, right now, ’cause I’ll bet with this smell in here? They’ll let it go for a song.”

  “I ain’t afraid a no ghosts,” Siragusa said, vamping Ray Parker.

  “It’s the live ones that’s the problem.” Bohannon puffed away.

  “I need a name,” Jesse said to him. “Can I look in the drawers and stuff?”

  “I kind of wish you wouldn’t. They’re bitching about sloppy preservation.”

  “Whatever.” Jesse shrugged.

  Siragusa poked the Howdy Doody doll, making it sway in its noose. “What do you think this goes for? It’s kind of like a rarity, isn’t it?”

  “Michael Jackson!” Jesse almost shouted, making both cops jump. Suddenly the name had rung a bell beyond the obvious. “I know this…Aw, Jesus.” She flapped her arms. “I know him, I went to school with…Aw, Jesus. You know who this is?” she asked Bohannon, who, like Willy Hernandez, she had grown up with, gone to high school with. “You remember Mrs. Jackson? The English teacher? Remember she had a son? Michael Jackson?”

  “Wait.” Bohannon’s face was working.

  “You got to remember. He was in special ed. Everybody used to make fun of him because of his name.”

  Bohannon looked at her blankly.

  “C’mon. Jerry—Michael Jackson, Mrs. Jackson.”

  “I remember Mrs. Jackson,” he said cautiously.

  “Don’t you remember that time she had that big fight with Markowitz in the hallway, screaming about how the school was treating her son, saying he didn’t belong in special ed, the kids were torturing him, she was gonna quit teaching there, sue the city, sue Markowitz…”

  Jesse saw the memory hit Jerry Bohannon, pushing him back two steps like a buffet of wind.

  “Fuck!” he hissed. “This is… She still around, Mrs. Jackson?” He grimaced as if hoping she was dead.

  “I think she’s retired,” Jesse said, feeling the same way and hoping that if she was still around, Bohannon here wouldn’t be making the notifications. The notion of one of Mrs. Jackson’s former mediocre students coming to tell her that her son was dead was intolerable.

  “Aw, man,” Bohannon said heavily, then looked at his partner for a long moment. Siragusa, having grown up in Gannon, not Dempsy wasn’t in on the Jackson family’s tribulations. He returned Bohannon’s pointed look with what to Jesse seemed like an artificial blankness. But Bohannon wasn’t having it, continuing to stare down his partner until Siragusa nodded, a gesture of surrender. Jesse felt like she was witnessing a telepathic conversation.

  Bohannon took a handkerchief from his rear pocket and used it to carefully pull out one of the desk drawers. Then both he and Siragusa emptied their front pockets into the open drawer, tossing back two rubberband-bound stacks of furry-edged baseball cards, a nickel-plated Zippo lighter, a fat swirl-textured fountain pen, and a Swiss Army knife.

  A great crash from the dining room had both cops spinning around, Bohannon with his gun out front, Siragusa sliding to the wall, his Glock held down along his leg, Jesse praying, Make my night here.

  The cat walked in, took a look, and ran out again. All three of them exhaled. Siragusa inched forward to check the dining room, his gun still drawn, Bohannon mumbling, “Just shut the goddamn drawer.”

  Jesse’s cell phone rang. It was Jose. “Jess, you remember that car-jacking?” His voice carried a certain restrained edginess that she hadn’t heard in weeks—a good sign.

  “Carjack?” Then, going bandido on him, “I don’t need no stinking carjack.”

  “Hey,” Jose said sharply. “Don’t fuck with me on this.”

  Jose losing his cool; a great sign.

  3

  Lorenzo found himself out in the corridor, without any memory of leaving the examination room. “My son,” Brenda Martin had said to him, “is in the car.”

  Maybe he hadn’t heard right. Closing his eyes, fending off the hall’s astringent reek of alcohol, the cologne of panic, he saw her face again, those stark, expectant eyes, and began to dread his next question: How old…

  When he finally walked back inside Room 23, Brenda was as he had left her, perched on the edge of the gurney trembling like a fountain. He approached the diabetic, needing to get him out of there, but before he could open his mouth, the unseen presence in the mound of sheets cut loose with another moan. Lorenzo wound up simply raising the flinching woman by the elbows and escorting her across the hall to the doctors’ locker room—swiftly and quietly, as if he were already trying to keep this Red-Ball under wraps.

  Placing Brenda in a folding chair at a snack-strewn card table, he closed the door and pulled up another chair, across from her, for himself. She sat with both hands covering her face, her knees
fanning back and forth like bat wings. Lorenzo took a moment to breathe deep, trying to expel the clamor that had shot through his chest like an arrow over the last few minutes.

  “Brenda.” He swept a half-full bag of Doritos off the table and onto the floor, clearing a space for his radio. “Boy, right?” He flipped his notebook open, the pen quivering in his fingers like a polygraph needle. “How old…”

  “Four,” she said, from behind her bandaged palms.

  Lorenzo dug his fingers into his eyes, pushing his glasses up to his forehead. Then, without ceremony but not quite roughly, he reached out and brought her hands down from her face to her lap.

  “Four. How old…”

  “I just said.”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Lorenzo told himself out loud. “What’s his name…”

  “Cody.”

  “Was he in a car seat?” Lorenzo felt his chest getting tighter.

  “No.”

  “Seat belt?”

  “No.”

  “Front or back.”

  “Of…”

  “The car,” he said, snapping, passionately telling himself he didn’t want this, didn’t ask for this.

  “The back.”

  “Hang on.” He reached for the radio. “South Investigator 15 to base. Stand by for emergency transmission.”

  “Base. Go.”

  “Advise all units that, that carjack in the South District? That, there is a child in the car, four-year-old Caucasian…” He stopped a second, looking to her for verification. “Caucasian male in the backseat.”

  “He was asleep,” she said, hunching forward, bringing her hands down on her legs. “He was sick. I tried to say something—”

  Lorenzo stopped her with a raised palm. “Child is, or was, asleep in the backseat, might not be visible to pursuing officers.” Lorenzo worried about cowboys going for some kind of run-and-gun apprehension on the car—shots fired or a broadside ramming, the kid caroming around the interior like a bullet in a steel drum. “Stand by for further description.”

  “I couldn’t get the words out.” Brenda was still in that jackknife crouch, begging, Lorenzo chanting to himself, Why me, why me, why me.

  “Brenda, what was he wearing?” He watched as she shoveled her face into her hands again.