Earlier, Jesse had simply walked in—no notebook, no cell phone, wearing a hooded sweatshirt despite the heat and putting on her no-face face. She strolled in like she lived there, which was almost true: the Powell Houses were just five blocks away.
Lion Piss. She wondered if her parents even smelled it anymore. She guessed they were more or less safe; no one really cared now if they were Commies or Socialists or Trotskyites or anything. They had survived the worst of the crack-induced chaos of the last few years, but they were still old, still white, so who could really say? Her father still talked to anyone who would listen or who had the misfortune to get stuck in the elevator or the laundry room with him, yammering on about imperialism, racism, capitalism, the CIA. Most people these days just nodded their heads, walleyed with boredom, saying stuff like, “Uh-huh, awright, I hear you, that’s right, OK now, OK then,” trying to avoid looking at his thin, desiccated lips, his filmy, eager eyes. Nobody really gave a shit anymore.
Laying back in the breezeway of Four Building, Jesse calmly continued to survey the players until she struck gold, locking in on the carjack victim, the mother of the child, Brenda Martin herself. The woman was engaged in some kind of anguished exchange with a large black lady of about the same age. Wondering what on earth could have motivated Lorenzo Council or any other non-brain-dead detective into dragging what had to be a fairly traumatized victim back to a zoo of a crime scene like this, Jesse made her move, easing to within earshot of the conversation, setting herself up comfortably in the big woman’s shadow, then blowing it by accidentally making eye contact with the man himself.
Lorenzo threw her a tight-lipped glare, silently demanding that she evict herself from the scene since he was a good fifty feet away and had his hands full with the victim’s brother. Jesse made a half-assed gesture of surrender, retreated a few steps, until she bumped into a tenant’s rust-eaten sedan, and proceeded to ignore Lorenzo.
“All my life,” Brenda sobbed to the big woman. “All my life. I would never—you know me. I would never do this to you.”
“To me?” The woman reared back from Brenda’s words, Jesse catching herself miming the body English.
From where she was standing, it seemed to Jesse that Brenda Martin’s teeth were chattering, clacking like castanets.
“I had no idea.” The words came out swoony.
“That’s OK,” the woman said, sounding kindly yet desperate, her head on a swivel as she looked around desperately for help.
“I loved him so much.”
“I know you do.”
“I’m so sorry”
“Nobody’s blaming you.”
“I had no idea.”
“They’ll get him.”
“I just want to die.”
“Don’t say that.”
Overhead, on the far side of Hurley, a Conrail train powered past Armstrong, the racket and rush turning the heads of all who were there but the tenants. Jesse embraced the noise, regarding it as another kind of cover, her concentration undeterred. Momentarily the two women before her were reduced to gesture and mask, until Brenda Martin blurted out loud enough to be heard over the tail end of the retreating roar, “I wish I could be born again. I wish, I wish—I want to still work here.” She looked up, wild-eyed, into the other woman’s face. “I want to work harder.”
Uncomprehending, tantalized, Jesse took a few steps closer.
“Brenda…” the big woman began helplessly.
“I have so much love in me.” Her voice was now fervent and husky. “You just don’t know. You just don’t know…”
“I know you do.” The response was singsong with misery, useless.
Two young boys came racing through the scene, both of them clutching a brace of wide-mouthed shell casings, holding them upright against their bellies, each red plastic hollow filled to the brim with dirt. Jesse stepped into their path, then dropped into a squat, spooking them.
“Who’s that lady there?” she asked, gesturing with her head toward Brenda and the black woman.
“The white lady?” one kid said.
“The other.”
“That’s Felicia.”
“Felicia who.”
“Felicia,” the second kid said, shrugging.
“You know the white lady too?”
“Salim!” Lorenzo called out to one of the kids, who dropped the casings and ran to his name.
“Brenda.” The woman named Felicia leaned back in order to make eye contact. “You keep with Lorenzo, he’s gonna find him.”
“He is?” Brenda sounded both hopeful and hopeless, stoned.
“And I’m telling you. No one here’s gonna stand for this either. They’re gonna turn him out.”
“Who.”
“Whoever took him.”
Jesse saw the squat white cop, the one the kids called Bump, eject two reporters from Hurley Street. Good, she thought, but then Lorenzo caught her eye again, posting another eviction notice. This time Jesse threw him a pressed-palms kowtow: Leave me be.
“Listen to me, awright?” Felicia said, trying to extricate herself from Brenda’s agony now. “You go to him. You go to Lorenzo right now and he’s gonna get you straight.”
Seeming dazed and malleable, possibly high, Brenda staggered away backwards, nodding in obedience. Jesse saw Lorenzo move to take her in, but before he could get to her he was abruptly turned around by some hysterical fat lady howling something about her mother being sick, and then Lorenzo just lost it, going all sputter-mouthed, spinning like a top.
With Lorenzo momentarily experiencing a breakdown and Felicia cutting out altogether, Brenda began to wander Hurley Street, up for grabs. Jesse’s first impulse was to snatch her but she reined it in, knowing that what she could expect here was an encounter that would last no more than a minute or two and that, if she did make true contact with the star of the show, she would no doubt get tossed from the scene. So she let the prize go, opting for Felicia, pacing her as she weaved through the jumble of tenant-owned junkers and police cars, heading for the breezeway of Three Building.
“Felicia!” Jesse called out. “Brenda—is she OK?” she asked, sounding like they were all in the same women’s group. Felicia turned, squinting, unable to see the face that came with the voice, Jesse having positioned herself so that the anti-crime floods over Three Building’s breezeway served as a backlight, reducing her, in Felicia’s eyes, to a silhouette. “I can’t believe it! What the hell happened?”
Felicia walked in a slow, purposeful arc until Jesse came into the light.
“You a reporter?”
“Yeah, but I was sitting at home and I heard… Does she work here?”
“I don’t know,” Felicia said, more uncomfortable than hostile.
“You don’t know?”
“Maybe you should talk to the police.”
“They said to talk to you.”
“Me? No.” Felicia smiled a little at that. “Who did?”
“You know Lorenzo Council?”
Felicia waited.
“You remember that story on him the Register ran a few months ago?”
“Yeah.”
“I wrote that.” Jesse felt like a pud saying it like that, but blunt was good when time was tight.
“Oh yeah?” Felicia was smiling again. “OK, OK.”
“That was me.”
“All right, all right.” Felicia was coming off mild now, almost warm. “OK, that’s good, because then he’ll probably talk to you.”
“No, he can’t. He’s all jammed up. Look, I just want to help. I… She works here, Brenda?”
Felicia hesitated, looking off, left, right, left.
“She works here, right?” Jesse pushed gently.
Felicia shrugged, giving in. “Yeah. In the Study Club.”
“The Study… What’s that, after school?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“A teacher?”
“An aide.”
“Works under you? With you?”
“Both.” Felicia scratched her nose, stepped in place.
“You know her son?”
“Cody?”
Cody: Jesse saw it in print.
“Yeah, he’d come in but like, he was just a mascot or something because he’s like, only four. The other kids—” Felicia’s voice abruptly turned hoarse and she stalled. “The other kids,” she started up again, her mouth trembling, “the other kids are like six, seven, eight. I hope they get that motherfucker, I swear to God.”
Delicately she scooped a tear from under one eye with a crescent-shaped, inch-long artificial nail, and Jesse, staring at the cast of Felicia’s face as the woman struggled to compose herself, involuntarily absorbed a history of bone-deep unhappiness—none of which, most likely, had to do with the boy Cody, or with his mother.
“Excuse my language,” Felicia muttered, looking away.
“Hey, no, c’mon.” Jesse quickly absolved her, then lost her: something back on Hurley Street had caught her eye. Jesse tracked Felicia’s gaze to Brenda Martin’s brother, the Gannon detective, who was getting all chesty with some of the tenants.
“That’s her brother?” Jesse tried to pull Felicia back.
“Danny,” Felicia announced, as if the name weighed a ton.
“You don’t like him?”
“No, well, yeah, you know, he’s got his job.” Her voice was weary, grudgingly diplomatic. “And, like I tell the kids, stay out of Gannon ’cause those cops, they don’t play, and if you pull anything cute over there they’re gonna come back in here after you. But these kids, you can’t tell them nothing. It’s like they were born deaf or something.”
“He seemed mad at her before, yelling in her face.”
“That’s not right.”
“Why would he be mad at her?”
“Maybe he’s upset.”
Jesse nodded as if enlightened: the pull-quote of the month. “What was, was she working tonight?”
“No.”
“So, what was…”
“She … We’re just settin’ up a new Study Club here, over in Five Building, and like, she said she had left something in there after we closed up and like, she had come back and got it and tried to drive on out through the park right here, back into Gannon, and got jacked. But see, I don’t…” Felicia faltered, then shut down.
“What …” Jesse prodded, thinking, Drugs, boyfriends.
“No, I don’t know.”
“What.” Jesse pushed gently again, but grinning while she did it—just two gossipy gals here.
“No.” Felicia looked off.
“She go out with anybody here?”
“That’s not my business,” she said pointedly, going eye to eye.
“She looks a little dazed.” Jesse meant stoned, smarting as she said it, as if apologizing in advance.
“Dazed?” Felicia smiled.
“You know,” Jesse said, just tossing dynamite into the water now to see what came floating to the top.
“You don’t have no kids, right?” Felicia asked.
Jesse shrugged, stung. “No.”
“Dazed,” Felicia muttered, shaking her head.
Jesse saw Lorenzo take Brenda by the arm and walk her toward the pocket park, the crime scene, and wanted to close this talk down now, get over there.
“So what do you think happened?” Jesse asked quickly.
“That’s like you’re sayin’ to me she’s lying, right?” Felicia ballooned up a little.
“No, I didn’t mean…What I’m saying is—”
“She’s a good person.”
“Good.” Jesse nodded, knowing Jose would change “good” to “beloved” all victims who were neighborhood fixtures or who worked within a mile of kids were automatically granted the appellation “beloved.”
“I got to go see my mother.” Felicia began to turn toward Three Building.
“What do you think about Hootie on this?” Jesse asked, passing her a business card.
“Who?”
“Hootie.”
“Hootie?” She jerked back, twisting her mouth in derision, and began trudging through the heat toward Three Building.
Jesse took a minute to watch Felicia walk away, waiting for her to ostentatiously flip the business card in the grass before she got to the breezeway. She found herself slightly off balance when the woman finally disappeared inside the lobby, the card still in her possession.
Lorenzo held the neon-orange tape high so that Brenda could enter Martyrs Park, and Jesse, twenty yards away, watched them with the covetous eyes of a social climber—the tape a velvet rope, the pocket park a VIP room, the posted uniforms nothing more than armed bouncers.
The tape stretched straight across the Hurley Street face of the park from a garbage can positioned flush against the Conrail retaining wall to one of the concrete columns in the breezeway of Three Building. From there it made a right angle, extending back to the low rustic stone wall that trimmed the border with Gannon.
There was no way for her to slip in under the Hurley Street tape. Anxious, Jesse tried to peer through the far trees to see if the Gannon side was guarded too. It had to be, but she couldn’t swear to it, couldn’t make out any uniforms from where she was standing. So maybe, just maybe, if she cut out of Armstrong altogether, walked around to the Gannon side of the park, the Jessup Avenue entrance, she might be able to slip in through the back door. If she couldn’t, she’d be screwed altogether, because she doubted she could reenter Armstrong like she had done the first time, but, but, but … she paced the rubble, clammy with desire, with indecision.
“Hey,” someone said, male, low-key. Jesse turned to see a young cop sporting a Fu Manchu, a Hawaiian shirt, and high-top sneakers—an urban action figure strolling toward her from out of the shadows, something almost contemplative in his casual yet deliberate gait. Steady-eyed, he tilted his head in a beckoning gesture, Jesse thinking, Busted.
“You’re a reporter, right?” He stood before her, his hands jammed in his rear pockets. “Right?”
“Yeah, but Lorenzo Council said—”
“Local, right? The Register?”
“Yeah.”
Jesse tried to get a read on him as he rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes, both hands sweeping out along his cheekbones.
“It’s like the invasion of the body snatchers,” he said, waving a limp hand to take in the world. “You got half the Gannon job here, the New York press. It’s like Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey.”
Jesse found herself easing into an alert openness. This guy wasn’t about evicting her: he wanted something.
“I wish they’d put a fucking plug in the Holland Tunnel, you know what I mean?”
“I hear you,” Jesse said, catching a glimpse of Lorenzo and Brenda Martin through the trees. “So you’re Dempsy?” she asked lightly, as if they were at a bar.
“Same as you.” He smiled at her, his eyes a cracked blue. He’s hitting on me, Jesse thought, scrambling for how to play this.
“You trying to get a peek?” He nodded toward the park.
“Shit, yeah,” she said, giving him a big smile.
“Well, let’s face it, you can’t, right?”
“You sure?” Jesse was going all coy able to dry hump, if need be, with the best of them. The headlights of a Dempsy cruiser abruptly bleached them blind, then cut out, leaving both of them blinking away dots in the renewed darkness.
“It’s nothing but a mud bowl anyhow.” He shrugged. “It’s… there’s nothing to see, really. No body no blood, no shell casings, nothing but mud and bullshit.”
“OK.” Jesse returned the shrug, hoping this guy felt he had to show her something, impress her. “Got any suggestions?”
“Suggestions?” he stared at her pensively. “You’re Jesse Haus, right?”
“Yes, I am.” Jesse stepped back, fighting off a hit of paranoia.
“I’m Mark Goldberg.” He extended his hand. As she had expected, his grip firm and slightly lingering.
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“So,” she said, almost demandingly
He cocked his head, as if knowing he had to produce here. “Come on.”
He held out his arm to drape it around her shoulders but then started walking toward Three Building without touching her. Jesse followed at first, then walked abreast of him.
“They got me coming off a double tour. I’m so tired I couldn’t bust a balloon.”
“I hear you.”
As they passed through the breezeway of Three, Jesse saw Felicia alone in the lobby. She was leaning against a greasy tiled wall looking lost and withdrawn, her head and shoulders framed in graffiti. Approaching the rim of the vast Bowl, Goldberg stepped aside for Jesse to go before him, as if they were walking through a door.
“Hey, Jesse?” He said her name with cautious delicacy. “I have to tell you, you wrote something about six months ago that I thought was very powerful.”
“Oh yeah?” Jesse started liking him a little, liking his courtly tentativeness. But cops were so fucking nuts as a rule.
“You wrote about Efran Ortega’s family, you know, after the funeral? Very powerful.”
“Really.” Jesse was wary of the compliment now, Ortega having been a grossly overweight drug dealer who died, possibly of a cocaine-abetted heart attack, while being arrested. One of the cops who had cuffed him was initially brought up on charges of using excessive force, then later cleared. The entire Latino community had taken to the streets for a week after the failure of the grand jury to indict.
Jesse hadn’t really written the piece—just dumped the images and the gestures, the grief-stricken words and faces into the phone to Jose. As usual, she had been more hidden camera than writer.
“Honestly,” Goldberg said, steering her through the people and the refrigerators as if the two of them were strolling through a boulder-strewn meadow. “You really gave the guy a human face.”
“Thank you.” Jesse wondered where they were headed.
“I mean, he was a cocaine dealer, a scumbag, had three violent priors, but whatever he had become, he was not born that way, right?”
“Right.”
“What’s that, nature versus nurture? Heredity versus environment?” Goldberg stopped, arched his back, grimacing. From the far rise of the Bowl, Jesse gazed down to Martyrs Park and the Hurley Street block party, the scene reduced to shadowed movement and spears of light. She smelled the overpowering essence of fast-food fried chicken; below her, two young women were sharing a refrigerator crate and a bucket of takeout, the woman nearest her using a patch of dead grass as a hand towel.
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