Usually, when encountering a roomful of her down-time peers like this, Jesse felt defensively contemptuous and intensely alone. This evening, though, with the double prospect of both an inside connect and a rendezvous with the birthday girl herself, she felt more plummy than scornful, more awkward than isolated.
As for her phone caller, she saw two possibles, both looking to be in their thirties, each sitting by himself. One was as big as a bear, puffy-faced, wearing a too-warm sport jacket, his pouchy, burdened eyes constantly flicking from Jesse at the bar to the untouched drink between his motionless hands. The other was deeply tanned and neatly dressed, a squared-away-looking gentleman whose short black hair and trimmed goatee were laced with streaks of gray.
At the moment, this second guy seemed to be completely absorbed in sculpting the fragile ash barrel of his cigarette against the curve of his glass, but there was an air of self-consciousness about him, an almost theatrical determination to focus his attention on the task at hand, that made her continuously glance his way, waiting for his eyes to lift and confirm her hunch. In any event, there was nothing for her to do now but wait.
Two stools down from her, one of the few McCoy’s regulars willing to breach the gap, a red-faced, white-haired old-timer, sat jawing with a woman Jesse’s age, who wore a Deadline U.S.A. T-shirt and nursed a scotch on the rocks.
“You see crime now? Bad, right? You know what I blame? Increased communications.”
“Oh yeah?” The woman from Deadline stabbed out a cigarette, lit another.
“Videotape, radios. Something happens, they get you on tape, you’re dead. Like Rodney King, OK? But also this. A cop has a situation these days, what does he do. He radios for backup. Call goes out, five minutes later you got yourself a block party—the neighbors, the family, other cops, reporters—and you got to watch it. Watch what you do, watch what you say. It’s like, your hands are tied, and you have to be careful, OK? Very careful. But in my day—now, I’m going back thirty, thirty-five years—you had a situation, you’re all alone, you did what you had to do. No videotape, no radio transmissions, no news at eleven. You did what you had to do to address the situation at hand. And the individuals you dealt with? They knew the score, they knew what was coming to them, and they respected that. See? Increased communications. They put the handcuffs on the wrong people.”
Surveying the room in the bar mirror, Jesse saw that her two possibles were hanging in, the cigarette sculptor briefly meeting her reflected gaze now, his face tense and melancholy. Jesse threw him a small nod but he coughed into his fist, and she wasn’t sure if he had caught it.
The bartender, thirtyish, with Moe Howard bangs, a brush moustache, glasses, and tattoos on both arms, put a second screwdriver in front of her without her asking.
“On me.” He rapped wood.
Although poker-faced, he seemed excited by the new crowd.
“You got anything green?” A TV reporter from New York, one of the networks, Jane something, bellied up to the bar. Jesse recognized her more from her voice than from her appearance.
“Green?” The bartender lazily stiff-armed the counter, leaning into his palms.
“Green. Vegetables. Salad. I need something green.”
“How about carrots?” he said slowly, having a ball. “I think we got some carrots in the kitchen. But they’re not green.”
“No problem. Give me carrots,” she said in an exasperated tone, putting it on a little. She turned to Jesse. “New Jersey’s the Garden State, right? You’d think they have to haul this shit up from New Zealand.”
Before Jesse could respond, Jane turned to the old-timer. “Are you telling her that crap about how videotape causes crime?”
“I think he’s got something,” the woman from Deadline U.S.A. said.
The old guy, eyebrows dancing, watched them with open-mouthed pleasure.
“So the mommy, what’s she thinking?” Deadline asked Jane, signaling for another, gesturing for the bartender to pour one for the old guy too.
“Right now?” Jane shrugged. “I’d say she’s thinking, Hold it together. Hold it together. It’s almost over.”
“Yeah?” Deadline tapped ash. “I don’t know. I think she’s the goods.”
“She’s an ice-cold, lying-ass sack of shit.” Jane lit a cigarette too. Jesse felt her guts shift, as if she were overhearing vile slander about herself or a relative. She eyed her two possibles again: Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.
“To your health.” The old guy raised his free drink to Deadline.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” Deadline said, returning the toast, then dismissed him from her world with a twist of the shoulders. “You remember that lady out in Oklahoma gassed all three of her kids?” she asked Jane. “What she say?”
“‘I guess I was having a real bad low-self-esteem day’” Jane recited, as Jesse ran the same quote through her mind verbatim. The old-timer, realizing his moment here had passed, slid off the bar stool, his face congested with anger and disappointment.
“Low self… OK.” Deadline fired up another cigarette. “OK. Say she did it. Was it an accident or did she have some plan?”
“I think…” Jane eyed a plate of carrots coming to her like a stack of Lincoln Logs. “I think it hit her maybe an hour before she did it. She chewed it over for an hour. So, it was like, semispontaneous.”
“And why.”
“Why’d she do it?”
In the mirror, both possibles were looking directly at her now. Jesse slid over one stool, making a space.
“Check it out.” A young bow-tied reporter, impeccably dressed in a crisp white shirt and razor-creased khakis, took up the just-vacated seat, almost sitting on Jesse’s hand. “You see that fat guy by the dartboard? He says he went out with her last year.”
“Is he talking?” Deadline took a carrot from the plate.
“He says he’ll shoot pool with you for twenty bucks a rack.”
Jesse leaned back on her stool and scoped out the fat man. It was Tony Kowalski, an ex-volunteer fireman, just out after spending three years in jail for setting fires all over Dempsy County. She had covered both the fires and the arrest.
She caught the cigarette artist staring at her again in the mirror. She threw him another tacit nod, this one definitely received, but all he did was look away.
Another reporter, a black kid in his twenties, wearing gold wire-rim glasses and a polo shirt, leaned into the rail, ordered himself a beer.
“We’re going over to Armstrong tonight,” bow-tie boy announced. “Check out the scene.”
“When.”
“What time was the… Same time she said it happened. Get the lay of the land, see who’s around. Talk to people.”
“You’re going with that bow tie?”
“No, no, no, I’ll go back to the room. I got this, like, Eddie Bauer duck-hunting outfit. It’s really casual. The brothers are gonna love it. Besides”—he draped his arm across the shoulders of the young black reporter—“I got Shaka Zulu here on point.”
Jesse suddenly got the bow tie, a tongue-in-cheek nod to Jimmy Olsen. She liked that.
Checking out her two possibles again, Jesse keyed in on number one, the guy in the winter-weight sport jacket, whose heavy, haggard face made him appear simultaneously bloated and gaunt. She noticed that he wore an earring, an affectation completely out of sync with his otherwise bookish aura. And although he looked stressed enough to have some personal stake in this ongoing ordeal, he had ceased returning her pointed glances in the mirror. She still liked number two.
“I was talking to some of the brothers in Armstrong?” the black reporter said, sipping his beer. “They’re telling me that over in Gannon they got this cell they throw you in—no door, no window, no food, no toilet, no phone call.”
“Then how do they throw you in?” Jane asked.
“They told me they put you in there for like a week before you can call your lawyer or something, right? So I run that by this Gannon cop
. He’s laughing, says, ‘Yeah, I heard that’s what they think, and we don’t want to do anything to relieve them of their misperceptions.’”
“Nice.”
“We shall undercome.”
Jesse knew that room, the holding cell right out front, first thing you saw walking over to the sergeant’s desk. The only thing unusual or disturbing about it was that it was Plexiglas—four see-through walls, no bars.
Bow-tie boy’s cell phone rang, and he gave everybody his back as he hunched down, speaking into the phone with a finger in one ear. The three others were suddenly silent, casually alert, trying to suss out whom he was talking to.
In the mirror, Jesse saw bachelor number two get up from his table and head for the bathroom area, around the bend from the bullet holes. She eased herself off the bar stool and began to follow, but a few steps from the bar her own cell phone began to ring. She returned to her seat with her back to the others.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, Brenda,” Lorenzo said, then corrected himself. “Jesse.” He sounded flustered by the mistake. “This is Lorenzo Council.”
“Hey,” she said softly, thinking, First name, last name—the guy is hanging by a thread.
“Did your brother tell you what’s happening?”
“Nope.”
“He’s gonna take you to her.”
“OK.”
“I got some people I need to see.”
“OK.”
“I got some people I got to talk to.”
“OK.”
“So I want you to stay with her.”
“OK.”
“I want you to take her home and I want you to stay with her.”
“Right.”
“Do not go anywhere.”
“No problem.”
“You be where I can find you.”
“No problem. Where’s she at now?”
There was a long silence on Lorenzo’s end. Jesse held her breath, praying he wasn’t changing his mind.
“Over at the medical center on the obstetrics ward, Room 907,” he said as if giving away his life’s savings.
“Yes,” Jesse said, bobbing her head.
“You pick her up and you take her right back to her house.”
“Absolutely.”
“Anything she says to you? You keep it to yourself. Something comes up? You page me on the spot.”
“Absolutely.”
“Now, I already spoke to your brother about all this, and he’s gonna take you to her.”
“OK,” Jesse said, refraining from making a comment about his repeating himself.
There was another silence, this one Jesse read as sheer anxiety, as Lorenzo searching his mind for something else, some other bottom-line mandate that he could lay on her. “Lorenzo, you OK?” Jesse said, just to break the silence.
“I’ll be better when this is done with.”
“You getting anywhere?”
Lorenzo hung up. Jesse was buzzed again, going out of focus, hearing things as if through earplugs.
“I talked to the guy in the video store?” Deadline yawned into her fist. “You know, around the corner from the house? Every night they took out two, three cassettes.”
“Did they have a record of the movies they rented?”
“Yeah, the usual.” Deadline fired up a fourth cigarette. “You know—Serial Mom, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Bad Seed—”
“Children of the Damned—”
“Child’s Play.”
“Mommie Dearest.”
Jesse drifted off, wondering why on earth a catching detective would hand over someone like Brenda, return someone like Brenda to a reporter for baby-sitting, instead of to another cop. She wondered what the hell Ben could have said to Lorenzo, offered Lorenzo, in exchange. There would be a price to pay, she knew that for sure, but she didn’t have any idea of its nature.
“The kid even had his own membership card,” Deadline said. “See, I really don’t think she did it myself. They sound like they were pretty tight.”
“Till the boyfriend popped up,” Jane said.
“What boyfriend?” bow-tie boy asked.
“There’s always a boyfriend. That’s how they do,” Jane said. “Mommy and the kid, they’re tighter’n a crab’s ass. Then Mommy goes and gets her a boyfriend.” Jesse’s chief possible returned from his trip to the bathroom, throwing her a quick glance. The call from Lorenzo had made her forget him. Shit. “What did that guy in Louisiana say to that lady before she poisoned her daughter last month?”
“‘I would ask you to move in with me and my mom ’cept for that nigger kid of yours,’” bow-tie boy piped up.
“No. ‘Cept for that half-nigger kid of yours,’” the black reporter said, correcting him. “Half-nigger.”
Pushing off from the bar, Jesse headed for the bathrooms behind the bullet holes, trying to draw number two up from his table again.
Standing in the dank, yeasty vestibule between the two restrooms, Jesse eavesdropped on two reporters as, one after the other, they argued with their editors over the pay phone. Each of them hinted at explosive revelations to come—new, almost-confirmed information that would yield a chain reaction of headlines—and, in general, blew all kinds of smoke in an effort to secure for themselves a few more inches in tomorrow’s edition.
After ten minutes of leaning into the shadows, her eyes beginning to sting from the endless waves of bathroom air fanned her way with each exit and entrance, she started to return to the bar and promptly collided with prospect number one, the bearish man with the hangdog eyes. The light bump backed her up to the wall again.
“Can we go somewhere?” he asked under his breath, towering over her one moment, then pulling back the next, the body language of someone who saw himself as too big. Her brother did the same thing.
“Go somewhere…” She let it hang.
“To talk”—he pressed his palms together—“about Brenda.”
Walking through the small kitchen they slipped outside via the delivery door. The slanting rays of the dying sun, that peculiar angle of light, made Jesse reassess this guy’s age as closer to midforties than anywhere in his thirties. Stepping away from a cluster of garbage cans, they took seats on the front steps of a run-down brownstone. A wooden plaque under the doorbell identified it as a halfway house run by the local diocese for recovering drug addicts.
“Can you give me your name now?” Jesse asked, watching the guy wrestle his way out of his sport jacket.
“I’d rather not.”
“OK.”
“I’m from Philadelphia.”
“OK.”
“I’m a writer.”
“Fuck off.” Jesse was up and two strides down the block before he could lunge after her and grab her elbow.
“No, no, please, I write self-help books. I’m not here for that. I write self-help. I used to go out with her, I swear. I just need to tell somebody. Please.”
“Books.” Jesse turned to him. “Give me two titles.”
“I won’t do that. I need to be disconnected from this. Look, I’m not going to ask you anything. This here is not my thing, OK? Please.”
His face was bearded with sweat, the downward trajectory of the rivulets accentuating the droop of his eyes.
Jesse returned to her perch on the steps. “Go ahead.”
“About three years ago? I had this book coming out and my publishers had me doing a little tour—just East Coast. Sit in a bookstore for a few hours, come meet the author.”
“What do you self-help people with?”
“Happiness.” He gave her a shrug. “Aspects of happiness.” Then, as if reading her mind, he added, “I’m happier than I look.”
“So…”
“So I’m in New York in this big chain store in Greenwich Village, sat there two hours, signed four books. I’m wrapping it up, another wasted day, and, I see her, Brenda, just walking around. She’s got the baby in that back papoose, she’s not there for my book,
but we look at each other, and she’s got those eyes, those light gray eyes, and it’s like bang, I’m goofy. And I never—this is not my style—but I say something like, ‘Excuse me. Could you please tell me what I can possibly say right now that would convince you to come have a coffee with me?’ It just came out of me. I’m never that loose around women, but those eyes of hers, they were like, like anarchy.”
“So…” Jesse was liking this guy.
“So she says to me, ‘You just said it,’ and the three of us leave the bookstore together, me, her, and the baby, and we go to Washington Square Park to watch the circus. Talk, talk, talk. I like her, I like her a lot. She’s smart, she’s dry and, about an hour into talking, I take her hand. That’s it. I take her hand like we’re thirteen years old, and she lets me. And it’s like…”—he put a hand to his heart—“like more exciting to me than, you know, if we had rented a room somewhere.” His hand came away, leaving its imprint in sweat on his shirt, purple on light blue.
“OK,” Jesse said, moving him along, then noticing that she was dressed completely in black, perfect for summertime.
“We walk around, walk around, finally she says she’s got to go home, she lives in New Jersey, so we go to the PATH station in the West Village. I say, ‘Can I see you again?’ She says, ‘Sure.’ And, like, in the street, we start kissing, just kissing, no grab ass, just like, arms.” He shut his eyes. “And lips and oh my God. Did you ever have an encounter that makes you remember everything you forgot you knew? Kissing her was like, like, 1966. It was…” The big man halted, shaking his head in remembered awe.
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