Freedomland

by Richard Price

  When Lorenzo finally bulled his way through to the clearing, he came up on Tariq lying under a tangle of extension cords with bizarrely twisted prongs, writhing like a snake and fighting off the medics who were attempting to Velcro him into a padded head brace and body board. The crowd around him had formed a perfe ct circle.

  “He’s moving pretty good,” some cop said quietly.

  “Lorenzo, they throwed him out the window?” one of the youngest kids asked, open-mouthed.

  Lorenzo scanned faces for an answer. A Gannon narco stepped up. “We had paper on him. Kid tried to pull a Monte Cristo. We never got past the front door.”

  “Lorenzo, they throwed him out the window?” the same kid asked again.

  “Didn’t you hear what he said?” Lorenzo yelled, pointing up to the open window. “He fell his own self!”

  A few of the kids stepped back, looking at him like Fuck You Too. Furious, Lorenzo suddenly remembered Brenda—what the hell did he do with her? Looking around wildly, he spotted her by one of the cars, a hand over her mouth, sobbing, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Bump Rosen was awkwardly patting her back and trying to spot Lorenzo. Halfway to his charge, Lorenzo saw Bobby McDonald on a cell phone and made a quick, desperate detour.

  “Bobby, you get them out of here now or we’re gonna have us a riot.”

  “Hey!” Bobby put a hand over the mouthpiece. “I got the prosecutor on the line as we speak. Meanwhile, you get her down to BCI and looking at some trays or I swear, Lorenzo, I’m handing this over to somebody else.”

  Sobered by Bobby’s rarely seen anger, Lorenzo turned to retrieve Brenda as Tariq was transported to the ambulance, someone saying broken leg.

  There seemed to be no sealed-off area anymore. Everyone was milling around, the kids agitated, the cops agitated, Danny Martin pacing back and forth in his flip-flops, a news van rolling up to the blockade, Brenda chanting, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” making eye contact with anyone who would have her. Lorenzo reached around to get at the tickling stream of sweat rolling down his spine. Yes, it was time to go.

  As Lorenzo moved to Brenda, one of the teenagers in a Top Cop cap—a kid whose tag was Teacher, a kid who Lorenzo knew had seen Danny Martin in these houses week after week over the years, a kid who most likely had had dozens of slapstick exchanges with Danny when Danny was around looking for people—called out to him now in that same smart-mouthed bantering style: “Yo, Danny, that guy you looking for? With all you Gannon niggers over here? He’s probably over there, tearin’ hisself off some Gannon pussy.” The kid was relaxed, beaming, his friends sniggering and hissing, the older residents giving the kid dirty looks, but nobody, including Lorenzo, expecting what happened next. Danny pivoted smoothly and caught Teacher with an uppercut that made a tooth arc out between split lips, high and graceful, like a dolphin. The kid hit the ground in shock but instantly sat up, feeling the grass around him for his Top Cop cap, which had somehow managed to stay on his head.

  A silence came over the scene, Danny looking as stunned as everybody else. He opened his mouth to say something, but Lorenzo knew he wouldn’t say shit, prayed he wouldn’t say shit, because apologies only doubled the damage, gave people license to rage. Danny just ground his palms together, took a deep breath, and briskly walked away—the best thing. Lorenzo hoped that, when the blood connection between him and the missing child became common knowledge, people would cut him some slack around here, not for Danny Martin’s sake but for their own. Lorenzo watched Danny stride out past the blocked entrance, get into a Gannon sedan, and drive away.

  Leo Sullivan, the older Gannon detective, caught Lorenzo’s eye and gave him a quick, tight-lipped shrug of apology. Lorenzo ignored the communication, taking Brenda from Bump. As he escorted her to his car, he quietly hooked up with some of his informants, contact coming through tilted chins, quickly dropped eyes, flappy hand jive down low at the pockets. Lorenzo set up three, maybe four meets this way: in apartments, on roofs, behind the 7-Eleven, and maybe at a craps house. He roughed out the rest of his night, straight through to breakfast, at which point he would know more or less how everybody took their coffee, what brand of cigarette they smoked, whom to play the us-versus-them card with, whom to Praise Jesus with. Gannon would be getting none of it, Lorenzo muttered to himself as he fumbled with the keys to the Crown Victoria—jokers coming in here doing the rockabilly shuffle like this, playing hard ball when there was no reason to, turning all his carefully cultivated goodwill to trash, fucking with the fine-tuned information palace he had created out of these houses.

  “I wish, I wish I could be born again,” Brenda, white-mouthed and dewy-eyed, whispered again with ardor, scooped over herself in the passenger seat as the car climbed onto the New Jersey Turnpike.

  “You what?” Lorenzo responded, reaching for the hand radio. “South Investigator 15 to base. Leaving Hurley Street, Dempsy with victim, heading to BCI. Mileage at 32001.” Lorenzo documented every second alone with her, doing it by the book.

  “Base to South 15. The time is 00:45.”

  “You wish what?” he repeated, eyeing two more satellite trucks heading for the projects.

  “I wish I could be born again.”

  “You religious?”

  “No, no, I just want—I feel like I know something now.” Her eyes were shut lightly, her voice still holding that passionate note of conviction. “I understand something now, and I wish I could just start over.”

  “What do you understand?” Lorenzo turned off after one exit, seeing that tooth arc out between split lips again.

  “I just feel…I just want…I just wish I could have one more chance. Just…”

  Lorenzo could see her eyes moving beneath the fragile membrane of her lids. He tossed thirty-five cents into the toll bucket, thinking he’d give a week’s paycheck to see the movie that was now playing behind those pink, papery screens.

  “Tell me about the guy again. Maybe you’ll remember something else.”

  Brenda wiped a slick of tears trickling down the side of her nose with a trembling finger, produced her packet of codeine tablets from the back pocket of her jeans, and attempted to shake one into her mouth.

  Without taking his eyes from the road, Lorenzo reached across and liberated the envelope from her padded hands. Brenda gave it up without a struggle.

  “Tell me about the guy,” Lorenzo asked again. He could hear a tablet rolling up against her teeth.

  “I’m so tired,” she finally said in a defeated whisper.

  Lorenzo fretted about trying to read her with drugs thrown into the mix. Then he wandered off, back to Danny Martin whacking Teacher. Teacher’s mother, Frieda, was a bigmouth on the tenants council, and Lorenzo envisioned all kinds of half-assed demonstrations and lawsuits coming down the pike.

  “Brenda, how many of those painkillers you take tonight?”

  “What’s the difference,” she said, looking out the window.

  “Base to South 15.”

  Lorenzo picked up the radio.

  “Fifteen. Go.”

  “Pick up 13 on 6.”

  He switched to Channel 6.

  “Bump?”

  “We might got a sighting there, Lorenzo.”

  Lorenzo tensed, not wanting her to hear that, to get her hopes up if it didn’t pan out.

  “Where at?”

  “Sea Girt.”

  “Long way.”

  “Not if you’re jettin’.”

  “Sketch artist coming in?”

  “He’ll meet you there.”

  “Who.”

  “Pierre Farrel.”

  “Bang me at BCI, OK?”

  “’Kay, boss.”

  Lorenzo glanced over at Brenda, forming a disclaimer in his mind in case the sighting was bogus, but she was off in her thoughts and hadn’t heard a word of the conversation.

  As they approached the Bureau of Criminal Identification, housed below a municipal garage, Lorenzo scanned the block for press. The quiet side street wa
s soaked in the inky shadows of ancient oak trees.

  “SI 15 to base.”

  “Base. Go.”

  “South 15 off at BCI with female vic. Mileage at 32008.”

  “OK, there, South 15, time is 01:00.”

  “My brother said to me last year, ‘You work in those houses long enough something bad is going to happen. And when it does it’s going to be your own goddamn fault, because you know what I’m saying is true.’”

  Lorenzo stepped out of the car, walked around, and opened her door. She sat there blindly, chewing over what her brother had said, then abruptly looked up at Lorenzo.

  “He’s so angry Danny. Even when we were little.”

  “Hey, Brenda!” As soon as she cleared the car, the voice—inviting, full of good news—turned her toward the shadowed pavement, but it was a verbal sucker punch and she found herself abruptly peppered with camera flashes. Instinctively raising her padded hands to hide her face, she sank into a protective crouch, looking like a boxer weathering an offensive on the ropes. Lorenzo came around the car and lumbered toward the shooter. The guy stood his ground, documenting Lorenzo’s sullen approach with pop and flash, until Lorenzo realized it was a no-win situation and reluctantly turned away.

  Guiding Brenda through the municipal garage, a silent confusion of police cruisers, parks department vans, and sanitation trucks, Lorenzo led her to the worn wood stairs that descended to BCI. It was an arraignment center and criminal-records repository so untouched by time and science that it had been used as a set for a movie about 1920s bootleggers. The tired joke ever since was “Yeah, the director said BCI was perfect; all he had to do was get his designer to upgrade the office equipment and he’d be ready to roll.”

  At the foot of the stairs they entered the reception area, flanked on one side by a heavy wooden bench and the other by a holding cell. In front of them was a waist-high wainscoted barrier, behind lay a vast and gloomy room of old wooden desks and metal file cabinets. An expressionless young black woman sat on the paint-thick bench waiting for someone or something and absently bouncing an infant on her crossed knee. Brenda smiled crookedly at the baby. Lost in her own troubles, the mother ignored her.

  “Yo, Big Daddy” a middle-aged man in a blood-splattered Pepsi-Cola delivery jacket called out from behind the bars of the holding cell. “That’s that lady right?”

  Lorenzo smiled reproachfully “There you go again,” he said.

  “Yo, miss,” the prisoner called out. “You in good hands with the brother here.”

  Lorenzo steered her into a side room and sat her down at a Formica table topped with a coffin-shaped bank of battered army-green file cabinets. Other than a massive brass scale that had been weighing prisoners since the nineteenth century, the only things of interest in the low-ceilinged room were framed headlines and news photos of notable police actions. The clippings ranged from the Standard Oil strike of 1913 to the busting of a Black Panther arms cache in 1969. A full third of the present police force in Dempsy were descendants of the men on the wall.

  “Now, Brenda.” Lorenzo rested a possessive hand on top of the files. “What we got in here is all the bad guys, everybody who ever crossed the line in the last twenty-five years.”

  “Everybody who got caught,” she murmured, slumping.

  “Well, I’m telling you, there’s a damn good chance that your guy is right in this box somewheres, OK?”

  “I just want to lay down,” she said softly, listing to the left.

  “I hear you,” he said, furtively tossing the confiscated painkillers behind him, into a wastebasket by the scale.

  “I feel sick.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think he’s in there.”

  “Well, even money says he is. You want some coffee?”

  She shook her head no, rested her forehead on the steel-trimmed edge of the table.

  “How tall was he?” Lorenzo asked, knowing what she had said but wanting to hear if she would stick to her original estimation.

  “I don’t know. Six feet? I don’t know.”

  Lorenzo extracted a long thin drawer from the cabinet, the 5′10″ black tray, height being the only criterion for sorting the actors other than race. He placed the file in front of her, but she wouldn’t raise her head from the table. After a full half minute, he picked up the tray and returned it to its slot.

  “Brenda.” He spoke to the back of her head. “You know, some people, they say the rap on me is that I’m lazy, you know, like, I only put out on something if it kind of tickles my fancy or there’s, like, something that hits me where I live. Now, I don’t think that’s true of myself, but I’ll tell you something about me that people might, misinterpret as, as laziness on my part. I know that I’m only as good as the people I’m working for. The, the injured parties, the survivors, you know what I’m saying? It’s like, if they kind of start going south on me? You know, like, losing interest?”

  “Losing interest?” Brenda said, rising up on that like Lorenzo had hoped.

  Lorenzo leaned down close and splayed a massive hand against his own chest.

  “Brenda,” he said softly. “He ain’t my child. You want me white-hot on this?” He reached for the 5′10″ photo tray again, jerked it out, and dropped it before her with a bang. “You get me white-hot on this.”

  The photos were secured through their bases by a rod that ran the length of the metal box. They lay facedown, staggered like straight-fanned playing cards, and Brenda started flipping them up one by one. Lorenzo sat on an empty desk behind her, tracking her pace to see if she was really working the faces or just going through the motions.

  He was also primed for her reaction to a hit—the truth of it would come from her body. In his experience, when a woman found the actor, she would invariably gasp and jerk back in her chair as if yanked from behind. A man, on the other hand, tended to shoot to his feet, bang the desk with the side of his fist, and point at the guy staring up at him from the tray. There was no science to this gender distinction: it just was what it was.

  If anything, Brenda was going too slowly, poring over each face as if studying a map. When she finally finished the tray he pulled out four more for her, from 5′11″ to 6′2″. A wall phone that hung by the door rang with a subdued trill.

  “Yeah, what’s up.”

  “Sea Girt was a bust,” Bump said.

  “Yeah, I thought it was too good to be true. What’s going on?”

  “It’s still kind of agitated, but we’re leveling out a little. We got something like six news trucks setting up over by the tracks. The prosecutor’s gonna do a press conference. How she holding up?”

  “He’s dead,” Brenda suddenly said, and Lorenzo put the phone to his chest, staring at her.

  She held a mug shot upright in the tray. “Cornell McCarthy. He died last week. His son is in the Study Club over in Jefferson.”

  Lorenzo slowly raised the receiver to his face again. “What else.”

  “What else?” Bump said. “I got a call from my brother-in-law over in New York? He manages the Avis outlet up the block from the Daily News, right? He said they just rented out everything in the barn.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, whoa, exactly. So I think we should stick to the phones, keep off the radio, ’cause God knows who’s gonna be listening in.”

  “I hear you. How’s Bobby doing?”

  “He’s a little goofy but he’s handling it.”

  “He ain’t checked in with me once on this.”

  “Yeah, well, basically—I just talked to him—all he wants to know right now is if you’re getting along with her.”

  Lorenzo thought about that, what it meant. “Yeah, we’re doing fine.” He concluded that Bobby wasn’t sold on this as an Armstrong crime either.

  “Bobby says bang him if you need him.”

  “Sounds good.” Lorenzo eyed Brenda, wondering what she was thinking right now as she hunched over the trays, whom she was looking for.r />
  There was a light knock at the door, and Lorenzo opened it a crack, expecting a reporter. “Bump, I got to go.” He hung up and opened the door just wide enough for the sketch artist, Pierre Farrel, to slip in.

  “There he is.” Lorenzo smiled at the artist, speaking in a whisper so as not to distract Brenda. He was a slender, bearded black man, a retired New York detective in his early forties. Carrying his sketch box in a black gloved hand, he came across somewhere between a roughneck and a bohemian—khaki shorts, construction boots, a large gold hoop earring in his left ear, long-sleeved flannel shirt over a T-shirt emblazoned with the United Way logo. Lorenzo appreciated the T-shirt, a nice touch to relax the victim, reassure her that the black man working the sketch was a bona fide human being.

  “How you been, boss?”

  “Good,” Pierre murmured, studying Brenda’s curved back. “I got into this art school over in New York? I start going nights next month.”

  “There you go.” Lorenzo smiled automatically, as he always did at the mention of education.

  “What’s it like out there?”

  “Stay in here,” Pierre said. “That’s what it’s like out there.”

  Brenda was flipping the faces at a faster pace now, starting to show signs of burning out, having looked at over a hundred mug shots. Seventy-five faces was usually the limit for crisp study.

  Pierre and Lorenzo sat in patient silence on the desk behind Brenda until she flipped the last photo in the 6’2” tray and abruptly dropped her head between her knees, her hands aloft in a gesture of surrender.

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo spoke her name softly. She raised her head slowly and turned to them, her eyes focusing on the black leather glove that rested atop the sketch case in Pierre’s lap. “Brenda, this here is Pierre Farrel.”

  “Hey, Brenda,” Pierre said gently, his own eyes unconsciously following hers to the glove.