“No. You cannot play me like that.” He leaned into her, making her arch backwards, her spine pressed into the sink. In her retreat from his anger, he saw again that she really didn’t have shit.
Outside, the shooters came at them in a rush, Lorenzo trying to shield Brenda, Jesse hanging on to his coattails, the barking of the mob divided between calling out for Brenda to watch the birdie, to say something, and yelling at Jesse to get the fuck out of the picture. Brenda reacted to this gauntlet by cowering, shell-shocked, then abruptly turning to the cameras with an open-faced eagerness, a wide-eyed, guileless hunger for reassurance. Lorenzo got the impression that it was not the cameras she was facing—those she ignored. Rather, she was facing the shooters, the individuals. She turned to them because they were there, personally engaged with her plight and therefore capable of granting her some kind of boon.
As they headed for Lorenzo’s sedan, they passed two reporters rooting through the garbage cans, bringing up Red Dog, Pizza Hut, a prescription bottle, one guy squinting as he read the label. Brenda turned to them, said, “That’s not my garbage,” with the same undisguised hunger for connection she had shown the shooters.
“Let me ride with you.” Jesse was almost begging.
“Jess,” he said, once and for all time. Ben pulled up behind Lorenzo’s car, leaned over, and pushed open the passenger door for his sister.
Pulling out, Lorenzo saw Jesse in his rearview The expression of anguish on her face was, to his thinking, way out of proportion to her loss.
Once they had rolled clear of the video mob, some of whom had jogged after the car for the first few blocks like rice throwers at a wedding, Lorenzo calmed down enough to eye Brenda’s discs: Al Green, Ann Peebles, Curtis Mayfield. She was listening to something now, staring straight ahead and moving her lips to the lyrics; Lorenzo could hear “Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” coming through her phones, minute and metallic. He didn’t hold the music against her, figuring that the phones were there to keep her brains from leaking out her ears. The only alternative was to conclude that she was both cold-hearted and stupid. Nonetheless, he recommitted himself to breaking her down, to maintaining a one-prong mind-set on this.
Brenda sang along with her disc in the hoarse, loopy, half-whispered croon of someone who doesn’t realize that she can be heard. Lorenzo touched her arm. She slipped off the headphones.
“Anything come to you last night?”
“Nightmares.”
He took out the folded police sketch, passed it to her.
“How does he look today?”
“Did you arrest anyone?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, pressed her bandages to her eyes. Again Lorenzo thought, She should be all over me, chewing my ass. He could swear that what he sensed coming off her at this news of no news was relief. “How you feeling?” he asked, looking at her bandages, seeing that the gauze on the back of her left hand was blotted the dark brown of dried blood.
“They want me to go on TV,” she said.
“Yeah?” Lorenzo didn’t tell her that she had been on already, that this morning’s gauntlet would put her back on tonight.
“I won’t do it.”
“OK.”
“They… I won’t. I just want to be left alone.”
Lorenzo nodded.
“I feel like I’m being crushed.” She stared straight ahead, knees running.
“I hear you,” Lorenzo said, laying back.
“I just want to be alone. I know I can’t, I know I can’t be allowed to now,” she said, her voice climbing to a penitential singsong, Lorenzo thinking, Allowed.
“But I just won’t do it. No television.”
“What if it helps find your son?”
“No,” she responded bluntly. She slipped on her headphones again and Lorenzo let it be, losing himself in running down the game plan for the next few hours, hoping that Bump had set the scene as requested.
Brenda bobbed gently in her seat, as if in prayer, her sing-along reduced to a high, toneless keen from the back of her throat. She remained in that state until they came abreast of the Mumford Houses, a mock-Federal-style low-rise project that covered two square blocks of the city. She looked up at the blue-and-orange billboard announcing the name, turned to stare at the buildings as the car passed them, then took off her headphones.
“Did you work the Kenya Taylor murder?” she asked.
“No, that wasn’t mine,” Lorenzo said, wondering where she was going with this. Brenda was referring to the stabbing death of a thirteen-year-old girl in those houses, the actor the jilted boyfriend of Kenya’s mother. The actor had waited for his ex-girlfriend to drive her new lover to work that morning, then come into the apartment and taken his revenge out on the woman’s daughter, afterwards writing with lipstick on the living room wall, YOU ROCK MY WORLD I ROCK YOURS. James White—Lorenzo saw his face now—James White.
“The guy, he’s still out there, right?” Brenda asked.
“Yup. Got married last month too.” Lorenzo left out that he had shown up at the killer’s wedding just to fuck with the guy’s big day. White didn’t have the guts to kick him out. Fucked up Lorenzo’s day too. “Did you know her, Brenda?”
“Yeah,” she said, looking at her hands. “I was a teacher’s aide at Forty-six School when that happened. That day, I swear to God, the kids, when they heard what happened to Kenya? The whole school fell apart. All these thirteen-year-old hard cases, hard boys, everybody, they were all crying like babies.”
“Yeah, I heard about that.”
“Nobody could teach. They had to send in this trauma team from Trenton. It was like a disaster area, that school. They had to set up, like, for a hurricane or a flood. They had this one born-again teacher, Mr. Conklin? He turned his classroom into a praying room, and they put a bunch of the trauma team people in the library, made that the time-out room for anybody wanting to come in, have a cry, talk about it. And the rest of the trauma people, they just roamed the halls to spot kids looking like they needed some help. And thank God they were there, because the teachers, they, we weren’t in much better shape than the kids.”
“Huh.” Lorenzo knew all this.
“I remember they put some movie on in the auditorium, just played it all day, anybody wanted to watch it, and they opened up the gym, threw all the balls out on the floor, anybody could play, let off steam. And on the fourth floor, they had this double-sized classroom. They made that the game room, and I was in charge of that, if anybody wanted to come up, play Monopoly or whatever, and, I remember everybody in my room, we had this enormous, like, life-sized jigsaw puzzle of America, all the pieces different states. I mean, I swear, this thing was maybe thirty feet across, and I just remember watching maybe a dozen freaked-out kids, each with a different state in his hands trying to put the country together. And this one boy Reginald Hackett, very tough kid from Mumford, real hard-core, I remember him standing in the middle of the country holding, like, Kansas or Nebraska or wherever, and he couldn’t figure out where it belonged, and he just bust out started to cry…” Brenda faltered, crying herself now.
“These kids…” She tamped her tears by pressing her face into her shoulder. “These kids, they couldn’t handle it, you know, because Kenya, she was from Mumford, and, like, Mumford’s the big feeder for Forty-six School, everybody goes to Forty-six, and the projects, you know what they’re like. It’s just one big cousins club, so it was like losing a relative or something, but…” She wiped her face and started in again, her voice fluttering through her tears. “But I often wonder why everybody fell apart like that over her. I mean, they had other kids, over the years, you know, die, but, I don’t know, maybe it was because she didn’t do anything to, I know this sounds horrible, but she didn’t do anything to deserve it. I mean, she wasn’t hanging out on the street corner, she wasn’t riding around in some dopemobile, she wasn’t playing hookie. She was home. It was early in the morning, she was getting dressed for s
chool, she didn’t do anything.” Brenda stared at Lorenzo as if pleading Kenya’s case, her face flushed and distraught, demanding.
Lorenzo grunted, shook his head in sympathy, waiting.
“I mean, things happen like that, it’s a lot easier to accept it if you can find some kind of, of lesson in it, but, you know, nothing. It was like the world had lost its mind. I mean, nothing.” Brenda licked her chipped and peeling lips. “And, like, Kenya… See, I think the school freaking out like that, I think it had a lot to do with Kenya herself, like, how she came across. Because on one hand, I’ll tell you, she was no angel. No way. But she had, like, this, this charisma. She was a big girl, big, big-boned, tall. And she was a fighter, all the time, all the time. And she wasn’t afraid of anybody. Like, even the boys kept their distance, because she was too independent for them and they probably knew she wouldn’t put up with any of their shit, you know, everybody calling their girlfriends ’my shorty’ and all that. But she had this great smile. And something else. She loved little kids and, you know, that school goes from kindergarten on up, and I remember seeing her around the little kids? She was the most sweet-tempered, gentle teenager I’d ever seen. I mean, if you were on eye level with her you had hell on your hands, but with the first graders? The second graders? She never raised her voice. And, you know, the thing with a lot of projects people, it’s like they’re always yelling, yelling at their kids. I mean they might not even be angry, but it’s bark, yell, shout.” Brenda winced and pressed her hands to her temples.
Lorenzo saw the towers of Armstrong in the distance and felt fatigue like a fine drift of grit under the skin around his eyes, in his joints.
“I don’t know, maybe people think that unless they can see a reaction from a kid, you know, tears or something, maybe they don’t think they’re getting anything across. Like, people don’t know that there’s this world inside a child, and maybe the more you yell, bellow, smack, the quieter the kid’s gonna get, the more that kid’s gonna hide from you. I mean this city… Most people don’t think like that, but Kenya, she was, she had a gift for being with kids. She had a gift…” Brenda trailed off, wiped her eyes, sniffing wet and raw. “Jesus.”
Lorenzo nodded, not telling her that Kenya was one of his many godchildren, that the killer, James White, had about six more months of legitimate police investigation coming at him—the exercise of perhaps a half dozen more angles of pressure on various buddies, ex-girlfriends, relatives, anybody who could place him in the apartment at the time—and that, if all of those avenues turned into dead ends, one night there might be this terrible accident…
“But anyways, Kenya. The day that happened I come home and Cody, he can see I’m upset and he asks me what’s wrong. I tell him a bad thing happened to this—I don’t know how I described her—this big girl in school, I think, and I leave out the details, but I tell him why I liked her, how she was a handful with kids her own age, how everybody was a little scared of her, but I also tell him how sweet she was to the little kids, how they all loved her, and Cody, I see in his eyes how he’s absorbing her, and he looks at me… He looks…” She paused, got a grip. “He looks at me and he says, ‘Mommy? Would she have liked me?’ And…” Brenda took a breath. “And I said, ‘She would have loved you.’ And he nods, my son, this little nod, and he says ‘Good.’ I’ll never forget that. ‘Good.’”
“Brenda.” Lorenzo parked the car two blocks from the Hurley Street blockade, alongside a surveillance van with heavily tinted windows. “Why are you telling me all this about Kenya?”
“About…” She hesitated, then said, “No, no, no,” touching his arm. “I’m telling you about my son.”
Slipping on her headphones again, she slunk down in her seat and pushed Play.
Bump hopped out of the surveillance van, and he and Lorenzo quickly swapped vehicles. Someone had left a copy of the New York Post faceup on the dashboard, the tinted windshield creating a mirror image of Brenda in her crouching anguish of the night before. Lorenzo snatched the paper away before she could see it and passed it out the driver’s window to Bump, who was on the street.
“How’s she doing?” Bump asked, rolling the paper into a baton. In the passenger seat, Brenda, phones to her ears, started to sway. Bump stared at her, then shot Lorenzo a look.
Lorenzo shrugged: Let it be.
Squinting through the heat toward the houses, Bump whapped the paper baton into an open palm. “We had us a big fuckin’ roll-around already this morning.”
“Who.”
“Jamal Bankhead.”
“And…”
“Me. Fuckin’ bonehead’s out there on the edge of the sprinklers hangin’ with his crew, throwing back forties.”
“He ain’t allowed to drink there.”
“No shit. I say, ‘Yo, Jamal, you got the DMZ we gave you guys under the overpass for that. Do your drinkin’ there.’ He says, ‘They’s bees over there.’ I say, ‘You can’t drink here. There’s all these kids barefoot in the sprinklers. You drop one of them forties, it’s a disaster. You don’t like the DMZ? Then go the fuck upstairs, do your drinkin’ there.’ He says to me, ‘If I was drinking glass-bottle Pepsis, you wouldn’t be saying shit, so later for that.’”
“What the fuck is wrong with him…” Lorenzo said, finding himself craving a beer for the first time in years, an unnerving sensation.
“I say, ‘Just get the fuck up there.’ I turn my back—ba-doom— I get it right between the shoulder blades. Some little kid sat on a sprinkler head, and the water, as they say, got misdirected. I turn around, there’s Jamal, like, ‘Haw, haw’ I couldn’t help myself: drunk and disorderly.” Bump started counting off. “Resisting arrest, assault on an officer. Clipped me a good one too.” He waggled his jaw.
“His grandmother just died last night,” Lorenzo said with disgust, but still thinking about that beer.
“Yeah, well, he might just have to miss that funeral as it stands now.”
“How about the other. They behaving themselves down there?”
“Who, Gannon?” Bump shrugged. “I think they’re getting homesick.” He scowled into the sun. “To tell you the truth, we’re all startin’ to come apart around here. Supposed to be like ninety-eight today? Heads up.”
“I hear you.”
“No bullshit, Lorenzo. We got to wrap this up. This place is ticking like a time bomb.”
“Awright. You got me set up down there?”
“They’re all in Three Building, the stinkhole stairs.” Bump passed him a tagged apartment key. “I even got fuckin’ Tyler out on loan from County for this. That’s one kid gonna owe me big-time.”
As Lorenzo began to roll off, Bump shouted, waving for him to stop as he jogged up to the van. He passed a videocassette through the driver’s window.
“I almost forgot.”
It took Lorenzo a moment to realize that what he had in his hands was a tape of last night’s Law and Order.
“Wait till you see that thing.” Bump grinned.
“Yeah, I forgot something too.” Lorenzo gave him a half-mast stare. “How do you like my girlfriend?”
“Who.” Bump squinted.
“Jesse Haus.”
“Who?” He was playing it all bewildered.
Lorenzo lowered his lids so his eyes were slits. “Yeah, OK.” He began to roll again. “And my name is Patsy Fool,” he said, dropping it, not having the head for this right now except to note that the next withdrawal from the favor bank was his.
Driving through the blockade without incident, Lorenzo backed the van up to the breezeway of Three Building, then hustled Brenda inside without anyone’s making a commotion. Avoiding the elevator banks, he turned her directly into one of the stairways, the superheated stench like a solid wall, the humidity giving the cinder blocks a waxy sheen and turning the graffiti into a fire-blackened smudge.
A few steps up from the ground floor, Brenda hesitated as she made out the four teenagers lounging along the stairs, another two on
the second-floor landing. They had been placed there by Bump to eyeball her, see if she was any kind of customer—sort of a reverse lineup. Lorenzo didn’t care for the stiff, unnatural poses, the jugglers all stone-faced, nobody even talking, each of them taking the task seriously, desperate to get the police out of there so they could start making some kind of money again.
Lorenzo led her past this crew, not one of them acknowledging her passage, and saw that three more jugglers were planted on the third-floor stairs like homeboy wall sconces. There was an uninvited presence, too, a stubble-headed reporter leaning against the glistening cinder block between knuckleheads one and two, smiling almost apologetically. When Lorenzo and Brenda came abreast of him, he slipped Lorenzo his card, said, “How’s it going?” and made as if to join them in their ascent. Lorenzo had to turn and gently shove him off. “You ain’t even supposed to be in here.”
“No, I just—”
Lorenzo continued to climb, quickly taking Brenda out on the third-floor landing. “What’s up there?” the reporter called after them.
Despite the disruption, Lorenzo was left with the sense that Brenda had just cleared local customs: none of the jugglers on the stairs had given any indication of having ever seen her before. As he unlocked the door to 3P, Brenda slipped off her headphones and ran her forearm across her brow. “So did I pass inspection?”
The apartment was vacant, freshly painted, and explosively hot. Lorenzo was instantly nauseated by the fumes; his shirt matted to the small of his back before he could cross the living room to crack a window. The view was directly over the pocket park, one floor up from Miss Dotson’s, and he gestured for Brenda to come over and take in this aerial of the crime scene, holding her back slightly, not wanting her to stick her head out and cause some kind of stampede from the train tracks.
Bump had suggested 3P, arguing that it was the ideal setting, allowing Lorenzo to take her out of her element and go one on one without making her defensive, the view of Martyrs Park justifying both the journey and the isolation. It was good thinking on Bump’s part, although Lorenzo wouldn’t have objected if his partner had bothered to crack open a window or two beforehand.
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