Freedomland

by Richard Price

  “Pierre’s gonna make us a sketch, OK? How you doing, you OK?”

  Brenda dropped her head again and reached back over her shoulders to knead the back of her neck but couldn’t because of her bandages. Lorenzo had to resist the impulse to do it for her.

  Pierre took a chair and sat about five feet away from her. “Before we start, all right? I just want to tell you I’m gonna do the best job I can, all right?” His voice was soothing and confident. “I got three kids of my own and I kind of feel like any kid out there could be mine, you understand what I’m saying?”

  Brenda looked off, her face gathering into a frown. Lorenzo felt her start to go down again.

  “Now.” Pierre popped open the case with his ungloved hand, took out a tray of more mug shots, a visual catalog of facial features for her to choose from. “This here is going to take a few hours. We’re gonna do this together, and we’re gonna do this right.”

  Brenda took in the glove again.

  “Now, when we get down to it? When I start drawing? I’m gonna want you over my shoulder, backseat driving me every step of the way, OK? I’m gonna want you to be the world’s toughest art critic, all right? You don’t like what I’m drawing? You don’t think I’m interpreting your, your words right? I want you to let me have it, I want you to give me hell.”

  Brenda started rocking on the edge of her chair. Pierre turned and exchanged a quick look with Lorenzo, who was still seated behind her—Lorenzo thinking, Here it comes.

  “You’re the brain, Brenda,” Pierre said, grinning. “I’m just the hand.” He rapped his black leather glove on the side of the table, the room filling with the hollow tock of wood on wood. Brenda sat up in surprise.

  “And what a hand it is.” Pierre was beaming at her now, holding up his prosthetic limb in triumph. “Funny thing is, when I had my real hand? I couldn’t draw worth a damn.” Brenda held up her own bandaged mitts and attempted a weak smile, a slight emotional rebound in the gesture. Pierre laughed like it was a damn fine sight gag, the two of them here together, Lorenzo down and out loving this man now.

  “Tell me something about the bad guy, just talking now.” Pierre began laying out his supplies on the desk, including his own fluorescent work light.

  “He, he came on friendly, not stupid.” Her voice was cracked and dry as if from disuse.

  “Good. All right. What else.”

  “He sounded, educated. No… More like, intelligent. Kind”

  “Good. How much time did you spend with the guy?”

  “A lifetime.”

  “I hear you. How was the lighting?”

  “Dark.”

  “OK, now. If I were to ask you to describe him to me, right off the top of your head what would—”

  “His eyes,” she said, cutting him off.

  Lorenzo liked that, her going for a small feature first rather than a big descriptive overview. Through the years, he had found that most vics experienced the violence done to them as a visually fragmented event. In sit-downs of this nature, the actor’s eyes usually emerged first from the nightmare haze of memory.

  “His eyes. Good. What about them?”

  Lorenzo hung in, waiting for just one more honest reaction.

  She worked her mouth a bit before answering.

  “They were scared.”

  And there it was. Lorenzo liked that, too, her description in the realm of emotion as opposed to the more detached and objective adjectives of color or shape. Cautiously he rose to his feet, like a parent trying to duck out of the bedroom of a half-asleep child. “Brenda.” Lorenzo dropped to a bobbing squat before her, speaking up into her eyes much as the two uniforms back in the hospital had done. “Do you think I could leave you here with Pierre? I feel I can do us more good back at Armstrong right now.”

  “Yeah?” Pierre nodded encouragingly at her.

  Brenda slowly raised a bandaged hand to the side of her head but said nothing.

  “We’re gonna be great, man.” Pierre nodded to Lorenzo, waving him out, then jamming a pencil between the thumb and index finger of his gloved hand. “We’re gonna do it righteous.”

  6

  As her brother swerved into the turnpike exit for Armstrong, Jesse could see the electronic campfire a quarter of a mile away, an Islamic skyline of hot-lit discs and spires. The sight filled her with a clamorous sense of desperation.

  Since she had gotten the boot from the houses earlier in the evening, there had been a fire in Gannon, a drug bust in Rydell, and an arrest in that double shooting right here in D-Town. The catching detective, Cippolino, had had to page her twice before she got around to taking down the tale over the phone: Tiger’s real name was Reginald Williams. He was neither the baby’s father nor the old lady’s son. Both of the victims would survive.

  Jesse wanted Armstrong. She wanted Brenda Martin.

  The press, kept out of the Hurley Street cul-de-sac by the blockade, had set up their visual base camp in the wide gravel bed between the train tracks and the razor-topped fence. From there they looked down on the crime scene and had a panoramic backdrop of urban misery for their on-site reports.

  Ben rolled up close enough to the media village for Jesse to see that the first press conference was under way, with Peter Capra, the Dempsy County prosecutor, searingly lit as he addressed a dense wedge of photographers and reporters.

  Having no interest in the straight show, Jesse had her brother drop her off two blocks from Armstrong. But as she approached the Hurley Street blockade again, hood up, an older Gannon detective, leaning against the trunk of a dope car, seemingly engrossed in eating sunflower seeds, murmured, “Don’t even think it.” His eyes never rose from his bag, and bristling with agitation, Jesse wound up walking back to the presser to watch the prosecutor. Flanked by various police reps, he was digging holes in the gravel bed with the toe of his loafers as he fielded the half-hostile, half-timid questions lobbed at him from within the wedge.

  “Could you comment on a report that a suspect has been thrown from a fourth-floor—”

  “Absolutely untrue.” Capra cut off the reporter, who straight-armed her microphone and stared at him with rigid intensity. “It’s my understanding,” he went on, “that an individual earlier in the evening was injured climbing out of an apartment window for whatever reason, but there were no police present in that individual’s apartment at that time, nor did that individual have any contact with the police at any other time in the evening, and I would like to think that all you assembled here could appreciate the inflammatory potential in rumors of this nature. Next question.”

  Jesse, wanting in, tuned out. Looking toward the houses, she saw that the fence that separated the press conference from Armstrong was hung with cable cords, camera bags, and battery packs. The shooters kept one eye on Capra and one on the projects kids who were beginning to climb the retaining wall on the other side of the fence to get a better view of the action.

  As the first wave of kids reached the fence, a few of the reporters, dissatisfied with the official information and the numbness of their own questions, started airmailing their business cards through the mesh. Jesse recognized in their energy-intoxicated faces the manic yet focused effort to sort out bit players from stars in this spontaneous production, which might run anywhere from a few hours to a number of weeks.

  The Armstrong kids, giddy with the disorientation of seeing night lit like day, of seeing well-known TV faces come in for a landing in their own backyard, began bellowing in all directions, some through the fence toward the press conference, others toward the houses, calling out to friends up in their apartment windows or still leapfrogging refrigerators back in the Bowl. The more agitated ones chugged tirelessly up and down the sloped wall, time after time, to haul new people to the growing mob. The kids waved, tossed up peace signs and gang signs, the latter most likely learned from music videos, raised unity fists, and in general created such tumult that some of the assembled press started yelling back at them to chill the f
uck out.

  Jesse noticed that some of the quieter kids were doing something else, stealthily snaking fingers and hands through the mesh to touch the electronic accessories hanging there—not to boost them, she intuited, but to achieve some kind of physical contact with the Power.

  One of the restless reporters, the thin, stubble-headed prowler she had witnessed earlier, scamming his way in through the blockade, now paced the fence, flipping business cards to the kids like a magician working a crowd. “Who’s the big dog around here, who’s gonna be my pipeline?” the guy growled in a thick, vaguely European accent.

  “Yo! You want the inside story?” a chubby twelve-year-old called through the fence. “I got mouths to feed. How much you paying?”

  “How much you know?” the reporter shot back. “Who wants to be famous? Who wants the girls?” he added, making all the boys bark and the girls emit high-pitched sizzling noises behind their hands.

  Jesse had seen this phenomenon before, thought of it as stage 1—the locals high on the novelty and the drama. But she also knew about stage 2, due in about thirty-six hours, when the residents would become irritated by the distortions and misrepresentations coming into their living rooms off the TV, would grow jealous of the airtime given to their bigmouthed neighbors, and feel both bored and betrayed by the suddenly unwanted visitors. That is, unless somebody started making it worth their while in a more private and remunerative way.

  Unlike the source-starved reporters, the shooters were less than happy to see all the kids clinging to the fence. One video fullback, having panned the assembled rug rats for a few seconds of B-roll, went so far as to poke a finger through the mesh and point at the biggest of the kids, saying, “I see you even think about touching this bag? I’ll make you an orphan.”

  Gradually, some of the Dempsy cops began crawling up the retaining wall from Hurley Street, appearing behind the kids and attempting to bring them back down to the houses. No one wanted to leave, a few clinging to the mesh until their fingers were gingerly pried away. The cops tried to maintain a light mood, not wanting to attract the cameras. As Jesse witnessed some of the childish struggles to stay and watch the show, for a queasy moment she saw the fence not as part of Conrail’s safety system but as the outer perimeter of a zoo, a refugee center, some kind of secured containment zone, and the vision gave her pause. It pulled her out of herself, provoked in her the impulse to actually write something in her own words, but then the moment passed, replaced with a renewed sense of panic: she had to get something going here, had to figure out some kind of end run that would separate her from the mob.

  She played briefly with the idea of working the kid who had fallen from the window, but it was too much of a sidebar. So she scanned the scene for back-door players. Facing the cameras along with the prosecutor were Ernie Hohner, the Dempsy chief of police—nothing there—Bobby McDonald, another cigar-store Indian; and the Gannon chief, John Mahler, whom she just didn’t know.

  The only one projecting any kind of left-field accessibility was Chuck Rosen—Bump—burly, bespectacled, completely out of visual sync with the lawyers and the chiefs; Bump, in his baggy jeans and Knicks cap, restlessly shuffling in place as if desperate to get back down in the trenches. Jesse watched him, thinking, Same here, boss. His frustrated two-step came to an end only when Mahler, the Gannon chief, whispered a few words in his ear, then offered his hand. Both men broke out into big grins.

  Jesse was thrown by the warmth of the exchange, the inappropriate air of congratulation, but as soon as Mahler returned his attention to the press, Bump was back doing the Squirm. They had never really met, Jesse and Bump, but she assumed that he knew of her in much the way that she knew of him; both their names were part of the urban back-buzz, minor lights in the crime-and-punishment Milky Way. And then there was her world-famous profile of his partner. Jesse wondered if this guy could be enticed by a companion piece on himself or maybe by something on Bump and Lorenzo together: Mutt and Jeff, Ebony and Ivory. Lorenzo had called him the second-best public-housing-based cop in the city, Jesse knowing a little bit of his story, although she couldn’t be sure what was apocrypha and what was gospel.

  The way it was told, eight or nine years earlier, Bump, at that time a city detective on loan to the Dempsy County gambling squad, had shot and killed an Armstrong teenager who had drawn down on him with an old Daisy air rifle in a darkened hallway of Four Building. Although cleared of wrongful-death charges by both the police department and the prosecutor’s office, he had taken a six-month leave of absence, then returned to the job, cashing in some favors to be reassigned to Housing and specifically requesting a posting in Armstrong. Ever since, he had been putting in sixty hours a week busting jugglers, breaking up domestics, organizing midnight basketball tournaments, track meets, self-esteem workshops, and basically refusing to leave the scene of the crime.

  As Jesse watched him spin out in the gravel behind the prosecutor, she could taste how bad he wanted to get back down in the houses, work the hallways, knock on doors. But then it happened again. This time Hohner, the Dempsy chief, grabbed him by the bicep, pulling him close to whisper in his ear, the murmured words producing huge grins and a warm handshake. Jesse started going nuts, feeling like she knew what it was all about, should know, but was unable to achieve the mental stillness required to pull the information up out of the files right now.

  “Is the mother a suspect?”

  “No.” Capra seemed angry at the question.

  “You mean not at this time?”

  “I mean, no.”

  And again: this time Bobby McDonald was shaking Bump’s hand, patting his back, and Bump was beaming, bobbing his head in gracious acknowledgment. Finally it came to her, what this handshake business was all about. Jesse felt hope like a thump in her chest, and withdrawing from both the speakers and the mob, she began to work out her play.

  “Congratulations,” Jesse called to Bump twenty minutes later, catching him on the tracks as he walked away from a quick postpresser summit meeting with McDonald and Hohner.

  “Thank you,” he said tentatively, squinting, sizing her up.

  “You must be very proud.” Jesse kept her distance, struggling to purge the desperation from her voice.

  “Ho.” Bump tilted his chin to the stars. “You don’t know.” He was shorter than she was, but his chest seemed a yard deep and his forearms had the thickness of softball bats.

  “Do you know who I am?” Jesse wanted to get that out sooner rather than later.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged, starting to walk away. “You’re a reporter.” The tracks were littered with reporters, some chasing the prosecutor and the chiefs, some trying to interview what few kids remained by the fence.

  “I wrote that piece on Lorenzo Council for the Register,” she said, hoping to slow him down.

  “Yeah, I know who you are.” Bump kept walking as Jesse paced him on the other side of the tracks.

  “I want to do a piece on your son.” That slowed him down. Suddenly Jesse was terrified that some of the mob would come over, try to make it a group thing, or change the subject, or do something that would drive him away.

  “You mean you came here tonight to tell me you want to do a piece on my son?”

  “Of course not. I’m just saying. You know, hey, local kid, national TV show. You know, c’mon. This city’s not exactly a hotbed of talent. It’s news. It’s something good for a change, don’t you think?” Jesse said all this knowing a piece on the boy was already in the hopper, the arts editor, lord and master of exactly one page, was supposed to have reached out to interview the kid already, but Jesse was betting that the lazy, fat-assed bastard hadn’t bothered to set things in motion as yet.

  “You really want to do a piece on him, or you just want me all softened up for a connect.” A reporter approached, but before he could open his mouth, Bump, without taking his eyes from Jesse’s face, held up a hand and said, “No comment.” Jesse’s knees trembled with joy “I want both,�
� she said.

  Bump nodded, exhaled in a huff, vigorously scratched his neck. “’Cause I tell you. Terry, my boy… You don’t know. His story is ten times more than whatever you can imagine.”

  “Yeah?” Jesse forced herself to relax, bracing for the possibility of a long, clock-eating narrative, telling herself it would be worth it, telling herself again.

  “You see Law and Order tonight?”

  “I’m working.” She shrugged regretfully.

  “I’ll get you a tape.”

  Jesse felt joyous over this comment too.

  “Because Terry…” Bump looked off, eyes shining. “You know about Tourette’s?”

  “The—That’s when you curse? Can’t help cursing?”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s, like, only one possibility. That’s, like, the high end of the scale. You can have that or other, you know, verbalities. You can have physicalities. You know—head twitches, body twists, facial. Well, Terry…” Bump looked off again. “He’s got, he’s got both, physical, verbal. He’s twelve now and he developed it when he was in, what, first grade? Started out like a neck jerk, didn’t go away, went away, came back, went away again. Then, like, all of a sudden he started sticking his tongue out, maybe three, four times a minute. Took him to a neurologist, said it could be Tourette’s, wouldn’t swear to it, but we knew, and you know, with kids, a lot of them grow out of it, so we’re kind of hoping maybe when he’s, like, sixteen, seventeen, we’re praying, but—” Bump stopped, collected himself. Jesse dreaded the rest of this story, assuring herself that it had a happy ending. The activity on the tracks around her was fading a little. “And like, when he was in fourth grade? The verbal thing started happening. Not cursing—he’d just make noises, barks, squawks, whatever, and you know how kids are.”

  “Yes, I do.” Jesse said soberly, thinking this guy was going to owe her big time after submitting her to this.

  “And the thing, the bitch of it, is that it travels. It’s in your neck, it’s in your jaw, it’s in your shoulder. It just kind of visits a spot, then moves on. But I’ll tell you, the worst, the tic that… Last year? In fifth grade? He got this thing where he had to drop to his knees every minute or so. He’d cross a room and drop to his knees two, three times before he got to the other side. I had him wearing knee pads for a while, but he told us if he had padding down there he couldn’t feel the contact. He needed to feel the contact, so… Anyways, thank God that passed. And we tried different medications, had him on, like, a blood-pressure pill, a pill that lowers blood pressure? And it helped for a while, but he kind of grew out of it. We try different things. Some help, some, you know… And we network with other families, so—”