“Oh, no…” Jesse said softly, a puff of pain. As if in recognition of Jesse’s one true response of the day, Elaine Martin abruptly reached across the coffee table and seized her wrist.
“You asked me a lot of questions, you know?” she said brokenly, Jesse thinking, No, I didn’t.
Brenda’s mother took a deep breath, then just caved in, her voice a wet stutter. “Now I have one for you.” Jesse waited, this woman’s touch hard to bear. “My grandson—do you think he’s going to be OK?”
The cell phone rang, spooking both of them. Reluctantly Elaine Martin released Jesse’s hand.
“Excuse me,” Jesse said, then twisted around and talked into the phone. “Yeah.”
“May I speak?” Ben asked delicately.
“What.”
“Nothing’s for sure, but I had a long conversation with some people, and I think there’s a decent chance I can get you back with Brenda later today.”
“No!” Jesse whispered, sizzling with joy keeping her eyes down, aware of Elaine Martin sitting on the edge of the couch, Jesse beating out the mother to her own daughter.
“Where’ll you be later?” Ben asked.
“Home.”
“I’ll call you. Everything else OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Ben said lightly, then hung up.
“Sorry,” Jesse murmured. Then, realizing that the woman was still waiting to be fed, she added almost as an afterthought, “Do I think he’s going to be OK? Yes. I do. You have to think positive, be positive.”
“Yeah?” Elaine Martin responded, oblivious to how distracted and lazy Jesse’s response had been. “I don’t know.” She shrugged, clutching her knees. “You know, with drugs, AIDS, crime—You ask Danny—These days, there’s so much hate, you can’t even look at anybody, everything’s a weapon. I mean what kind of world is this to live in?”
Buzzed with anticipation, Jesse tried to respect the mood of the room, but her body took over and she began to make wrap-up gestures, closing her notebook, demonstratively dropping her hands on her thighs. Elaine Martin took in the pantomime with bitter comprehension.
“Look, the detective who caught the case?” Jesse said. “He’s the best. Ask your son.” Then, sensing that her parting gift was sorely inadequate, she reopened her notebook, tore off a sheet, and wrote down her pager number. “I just had a work emergency come up, but here—Whatever I can do for you, anything, just call me.” Jesse slid the sheet across the table, realizing as she did that Bump had written his home number on the other side.
Elaine Martin regarded this final offering with a knowing eye. “Our one millionth customer, huh?”
Jesse, swallowing a hit of shame, simply shrugged in apology, thinking, Lady, if you only knew.
Jesse left the mother’s house to face that same dumbstruck, bristle-chinned sentry leaning against the Martin gate. He stared at her with an open-mouthed scowl, as if possessed by an anger whose source had been lost in time. As she headed for the nearest PATH station, the afterburn of her graceless exit set up house in her—there had been no real need to beat it out of there like that. As long as she had the phone, Ben could reach her anywhere. It was the job, she decided, a reflexive world of brusque gestures, brusque prioritizing, everyone conditioned to race the clock, race the information.
The problem with convincing people who were in the clutch of some personal catastrophe to open up to you was that they opened up, and the trick, always, after you had gotten the information you came for, was the getaway. Once you got them going, they never seemed to be able to stop talking, they never wanted you to leave the house, hang up the phone. Instead, they nailed you with their silent response to your “OK, then,” your “Hey, I’ll call you in a few days, OK?” Any kind of closer you could think of met with a mute plea to stay on the line, stay in the kitchen—the wife wasn’t finished convincing you and herself that it was OK that her husband was killed, the grandmother wasn’t finished babbling on about how her grandson, her granddaughter, won’t ever have to deal with AIDS, drugs, prostitution, how they’re “safe,” now that they’re dead. All of them going on and on, and all you can think of is, How do I get off the phone. How do I get out that door. This story’s got a forty-eight-hour shelf life, maybe less, and I gots to go, I gots to go. Jesse was telling herself, It’s the job; asking herself, What else is there?
A rank and clammy riverborne current of air rose to meet her as she tripped down the stairs of the Allerton Avenue PATH station. The Allerton stop was one of two stations in Gannon, and Jesse was planning to take the train to Burke Avenue in Dempsy three blocks from her apartment.
On the dingy mezzanine level of the station she caught a glimpse of that day’s New York Daily News, with two pictures side by side—the police sketch of the jacker and the photo of Cody feeding the goat from a baby bottle—and above that, the header, in blaring type: HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? Jesse continued downward to the trains. It was a dead hour, and, save for a scatter of commuters, the station was deserted. In the middle of the long Dempsy-bound platform, there was a pole-mounted pay phone beneath a suspended, blue-screened video monitor that flashed the time: 2:45 P.M. The readout and the lonely phone made her almost crazy. She had roughly two hours to put something together for Jose. So far, all she had was texture and anecdote, miles of texture and anecdote, no hard information. That was probably OK with the paper, given the nature of the assignment, but it drove her wild to have been so close to the principals and have nothing to show for it.
As she waited for the train, compulsively leaning over the edge of the platform and peering into the depthless tunnel, her ear cocked for that telltale rumble, she began to work out the right tone for her experience so far, something sympathetic to Brenda’s ordeal but devoid of any emotionality that would set her up as a horse’s ass if it turned out that Brenda was a bad player. Elaine Martin’s tale was tricky too. Jesse was more or less unable to use the history-of-interracial-boyfriends angle, the withholding of Grandma’s visitation rights, the cult-therapy angles, unless it came to pass that Brenda had done the deed. With her eye straying to the time again, Jesse returned to assessing what she could run with right now regarding Elaine Martin—cop widow, cop mom, the lonely vigil—then surprised herself with the realization that she was actually thinking in terms of shaping, of writing, rather than just dumping to Jose.
Feeling both pleased and shaky, she became so absorbed in the possibilities that she didn’t see trouble until it was almost upon her—three white teenagers, Gannon homeboys, dressed in black-boy droop, baggy-assed shin-length denim shorts and oversized hockey jerseys. It was big-time trouble, the three of them lumbering purposefully down the near-deserted platform, their averted eyes giving them away, looking everywhere but at her, furtively scoping out the sidelines, the hulkiest kid on point, eyes downcast, mouth tight, his chest heaving with excitement. Jesse recognized the group body language from a dozen urban shit storms, having once had her nose broken covering a Save the Children concert turned riot in the Dempsy Arena. She felt powerless but calm, her thoughts, her history, involuntarily coming at her in isolated images, slightly fuzzed and trembling like fixed video shots on the control panel of a surveillance system—her desk, her doll, the beach, her parents…
With her mind momentarily purified by fear, she looked at the Gannon boys bearing down and she had the odd sensation of knowing, absolutely knowing, that at least one of them was named Mike—which one, she had no idea—and when they were close enough to touch, Jesse barked, “Mike!” Not one of them reacted to the name.
Leaving her body behind, Jesse numbly waited for what was to be, but as they came upon her, they simply parted and regrouped behind her, heading for the end of the platform, for the black kid standing thirty or so feet to her rear, and she experienced a wave of embarrassed relief.
The black kid looked to be in his early twenties, wearing jeans and a button-down shirt. He held a stack of manila folders under his arm—some kind of me
ssenger or student—and he stared at the three-man convoy with the same perfect, helpless comprehension that Jesse imagined had been on her face a few seconds before. They came to a halt in a rough triangle, one behind him, the other two flanking his front, all of them big-eyed, everybody waiting, four hammering hearts, the black kid just standing there flat-footed, breathless, waiting along with the rest.
The punch came from behind, from the biggest kid—snowy blond crew cut and Pittsburgh Penguins jersey—clocking him on the side of the head with an impossibly fast roundhouse, then hopping backwards, bobbing up and down as if sent to a neutral corner. The black kid said, “Ow,” lucid and chatty, his ear instantly ballooning, his kneecaps running as he struggled to hold on to his manila baggage. One folder spilled to the platform.
And then they all waited again, standing there under the lingering resonance of that shell-shocked “Ow,” the four of them seemingly in the grip of a strange hyped-up shyness. The kid made no move to escape. Trembling, frowning, he busied himself realigning the remaining folders under his arm. Jesse was scared but finally shouted, “Hey,” following it up with an angry Fuck, for no reason that she could explain. She raised her brother’s cell phone, as if threatening to make a call.
Finally, one of the other two swung out with a half-assed karate kick aimed at the ribs, the point of the blow absorbed by the folders but the momentum shoving the kid sideways into a support girder. His right temple slapped up against a paint-chipped rivet with an audible vibration. Still clutching his folders, he finally dropped to his knees, as Jesse yelled, “Stop it!” then “Police!” No one paid her any attention. She was too scared to do anything but harangue them and fearful that, if she left the platform to get help, the kid would be killed.
The third hitter took his shot, a sneakered dropkick to the chest. The kneeling vic arched backwards, over his own calves, bursting out with a teary “God!” that sounded more exasperated than frightened but that propelled Jesse to physical commitment. She found herself kneeling next to him, shoulder to shoulder, not knowing what her point here was, some kind of “We Shall Overcome” reflex from her childhood perhaps, better late than never.
The three hitters exchanged looks and began to walk off, the biggest one first dropping to one knee on the other side of the dazed kid and, almost gently, prying the manila folders from under his rigid elbow. Casually he flung the folders onto the Dempsy-bound tracks. “That’s for Cody Martin, all right?” he said in a conversational, almost solicitous tone, completely devoid of rancor, as if he were relieved to be finished with the deed and was now offering a detached explanation for his actions. Using the black kid’s shoulder as a support, he rose to his feet. “Spread the word, my man,” he declared, walking away backwards, until he caught up with the other two heading for the turnstiles. The karate kid spun to face them now, bellowing, “This ain’t D-Town, Yo. This is Marlboro Country!” The three of them hopped the turnstiles and, clambering back up the stairs, disappeared unmolested onto the street.
The police came on the scene in less than ten minutes, but for all they did when they got there, Jesse decided, they could just as easily have shown up the following day.
Leaning tiredly against a support girder, growing nauseated from the dank, tidal stench of the PATH tunnels, Jesse noticed that the two responding cops had the same last name. One looked twice the age of the other, and she had to wonder if they were father and son. Gannon was supposed to have something like eight multigenerational families actively on the job, one family, to her knowledge, bragging three brothers, two sisters, and both parents. Another family, the Longos, had a grandfather who was the assistant chief of police, with two detective sons and three granddaughters, one in narcotics, the other two in patrol cars.
Related or not, the two Officer Mullanes were on opposite ends of the stick on this one, the younger willing to take this thing all the way, the older doing everything he could to keep the beating of the black kid a ghost incident.
“So where is he?” Mullane Senior asked, hands on hips, grimacing as if he had cramps. “Where’s the victim? We don’t have a victim, what do you want me to do?”
Jesse had expected this reaction. Freaked, the battered kid had taken off as soon as she dialed 911. Nonetheless, she had gone ahead and called in, if only to give the incident an official, documentable existence, to start a paper trail in case she wanted to write about it—first-person, something with a real voice.
“Those are his envelopes.” Jesse pointed to the large manila folders scattered on the tracks. “I can see a return address from here. It shouldn’t be that hard to track him down.”
“Awright.” Mullane Senior shrugged. “I got to call it in to the PATH, get them to shut off the juice.” Jesse stared at him fixedly, made an ostentatious show of writing down his name and shield number.
“Nah, Jimmy,” the younger cop said, gauging the drop from the platform to the tracks. “I’ll just jump down.”
The elder Mullane grabbed him by his elbow. “No, no, no. This tunnel, you can’t tell if the train’s two stations away or two yards. Forget it. This lady wants us to shut down the line? That’s what we got to do.”
Jesse looked at the time on the blue screen: 3:15. Fuck. “This is such bullshit,” she said.
The senior officer cocked his head, staring at her. “Nah, this isn’t bullshit. You know what’s bullshit? You trying to fan the flames around here just to grab some ink. That’s bullshit.”
Jesse flushed. “It happened.”
“Yeah? I promise you, you run with this? Make us go through with some kind of investigation? A lot more is gonna happen too. Shit like this tends to have babies. You want to write it up? Hey, it’s a free country. Just remember, if you do? The next cracked head is because of you.”
The younger cop seemed embarrassed. He busied himself with studying the envelopes on the tracks until a Dempsy-bound train abruptly appeared out of the blackness and the envelopes were no more. The older cop leaned into Jesse and tapped his shield. “Mullane 45382.”
“Let me ask you.” Jesse opted to be less confrontational. “You get any other incidents like this today? Is this going around?” He gave her another of those lead-lined stares. “C’mon, Mullane, I’m a working girl.”
Shaking his head, he hooked his partner by the arm, flashed her a V, said “Peace,” and walked away.
As Jesse entered the lobby of her apartment house, the smell of canned air made her feel like she was in the first-class lounge of a regional airline. Rhythmic clanking could be heard from the ground-floor health club, someone in there roaring through clenched teeth like a constipated lion.
“Yes?” The maroon-uniformed doorman tilted forward over his desk, his knuckles resting on the photo of Cody Martin feeding the goat in that day’s Jersey Journal.
“I live here,” Jesse mumbled, dangling her key and heading for the elevator.
The apartment was suffocating, sealed tight with the air-conditioner off, the contained heat dense enough to peel steel. Through the half-open door of her roommate’s bedroom, the real bedroom, she spied a bald, naked man, belly-down asleep on the unkempt bed. Jesse stared at his body, trim but hairy, thinking, A jogger. She moved to her own, make-do room—mattress on the floor, laundry piled high enough to be considered furniture, her poster photo of the New York skyline pushpinned into the wall next to her view of the real thing.
The heat had caused the window frame to expand, and, sweat running in rivulets under her clothes, she strained unsuccessfully to get the window open. She didn’t want to call in to Jose. She had to call in to Jose. Leaving the room, she went into the kitchenette, the smell of the flavored coffees making her sick, and studied the naked man through the bedroom door. She took a shower with the bathroom door open, willing her mind to go blank.
Jose.
Wearing a towel, she came out into the living room—the small space left over from the creation of her bedroom—turned on the TV, hit the mute button, caught footage
of Brenda standing in her window this morning, and saw her own arm snake out and pull down the shade. She always watched the news with the sound turned off; data compiled by others made her too crazy In a last spasm of delay, she switched channels and resumed the volume, staring blindly for a few anxious minutes at a fat chef dicing something up. She levitated clean off the carpet when the naked man violently slammed shut the bedroom door.
“Jose…”
“Fuck! Where the hell you been?”
“I was busy.” Sitting nude on her unmade mattress, Jesse spoke with the phone locked between her jaw and her shoulder, her hands free to check her notes.
“I heard you lost her,” he said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Your brother called in. Said you interviewed her mother?”
“I did.”
“We already got the mother.”
“Who.”
“Jeff.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Call in now and then and you’d know. So tell me about Brenda. She do it?”
“Can’t say.”
“But did she do it.”
“I don’t know.” Jesse stood up; the mattress was too inviting.
“Are you in love?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. She’s hurting for real. I mean, you know, for what it’s worth.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jose cleared his throat, ready “How so?”
“She’s alone.”
“Right.”
“I mean alone. No family, no friends. I mean, she’s like, hunkered in the bunker. Well, the brother came by.”
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