George, upright now, was trying to jump out the window, bringing the desk with him. Lorenzo staggered to his feet and felt the blood tickling the nape of his neck, the steel drawer-pull on the top file cabinet having caught him in the back of his hairless head. Ignoring George, who was moaning, his bowed head spattering the desk with blood, Lorenzo followed the commotion into the history-lined hallway, where Danny was being restrained by all six of his fellow detectives. Only now was he starting to calm down, the mulberry flush of his face receding in patches.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Lorenzo found himself shouting it out, his hand coming away bright red from the back of his head.
“Me?” Danny started writhing against the glazed wall, knocking a photo of a fifty-year-old homicide to the floor.
“Council!” Leo Sullivan barked, his forearm pinning Danny, chest to the wall. “Take a hike!”
“Me?” Danny shouted. “I’m doing your job, you fuckin’ deadbeat! You’re supposed to be king of the jungle out there? How’d you miss this monkey, hah?”
“You best get out of here,” Boris Hope said to Lorenzo, sounding calmer than the others, as if being black gave him more communication skills in a situation like this—Lorenzo thinking, Fuck you too, Boris.
“You ain’t doin’ nothin’ but balling things up for everybody, your sister included,” Lorenzo said evenly, the laceration starting to sting. “And if your people here got any kind of sense, they’ll tell you the same.”
All six of the detectives were nodding, winking, bobbing their heads at Lorenzo, each one in his own way signaling him, begging him, to get lost. Disgusted, Lorenzo turned and began to walk off, looking for a bathroom, for some cold water and a mirror.
“Hey, Lorenzo,” Danny barked out. The detectives, who had cautiously eased their grip, now lurched drunkenly to restrain him again in the middle of the hallway.
“What are you doin’ here, protecting your own?”
“I don’t know.” Lorenzo stopped, turned back. “Maybe I should ask you the same damn question.”
Coming out of the men’s room ten minutes later with a wet wad of toilet paper pressed to the back of his head, Lorenzo caught the tail end of the arrest procession heading toward the reception area. He fell in beside Leo Sullivan and the handcuffed, bloody-faced George Howard.
“I swear to you,” Leo murmured to Lorenzo. “We didn’t even tell Danny that we picked him up.”
“So now you going through with the arrest anyhow, huh?” Lorenzo winced, his cut deep. Leo shrugged, not too happy about it. “This don’t even make no sense, Leo,” Lorenzo said, his voice low and urgent. “You lock him up on this child support thing, he lawyers up, you can’t even question him about the other. C’mon, man, what are you doin’? Talk to Brenda. She’ll settle it in a heartbeat.”
Leo sucked his teeth. It had become one of those legalistic miscalculations that seem to take on lives of their own, demanding of their actors that they be played out to the end. “Hip-deep in the Big Muddy, huh?” Leo said regretfully. “Fuck it. We’ll work something out.”
At least Danny Martin was gone. As they entered the barren outer vestibule, they were bushwhacked by Curious George’s family.
George’s people were all women—his grandmother, Miss Dotson; his aunt Risa, a blaze-eyed, coal-black woman; and his older sister, Charise, pregnant, her hair up in rollers. The two younger women screamed at the sight of him, cuffed and bloody, the grandmother swooning, slowly clapping her hands in despair. Lorenzo realized he had never seen her standing, let alone outside her apartment, and as Risa and Charise screeched in rage—as the detectives, pissed and disoriented, began barking to Julius Raymond at the reception window to get these fucking people out of here, the room becoming airless and rank with anger—Lorenzo wondered how this old swollen-footed lady had made it up the stairs to the second floor.
“You beat him for child support?” Charise howled, fists knotted at her sides, her throat bulging. “You motherfuckers did all this to him for child support?”
“Lord have mercy.” Miss Dotson continued clapping her hands.
“We’re gonna sue your motherfuckin’ asses.” Risa swung at Leo, and Lorenzo grabbed her in a bear hug, talking in her ear, Leo’s eyes filling with murder.
“And look at this nigger here,” Charise spat at Boris, who returned her contempt with a thick pointed finger. “Yeah, what you gonna do to me, I’m pregnant, you black motherfucker. You gonna kick me in the belly?”
Rather than use force to evict George’s family, the detectives decided it would be wiser to retreat back through the intake center, Charise kicking the swiftly shut and locked door, screaming after them, “He din’t take that white bitch’s kid!”
Lorenzo felt momentarily torn between staying with George’s family and retreating with the Gannon squad, then decided to hang in, try to calm them down. He put a hand on the pregnant woman’s shoulder. “Charise, Charise.”
“What they do that for?” Charise trembled with anger, her spittle like a fine mist on his face.
“It’s gonna be OK, it’s gonna be OK,” Lorenzo crooned, nonsense words that Charise returned with an open-handed pop in the chest.
“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” she said through quivering lips, pointing over his shoulder to the locked door. “But I think you best be sticking to them.”
16
Room 907, Brenda’s room on the obstetrics ward of the medical center, was empty, the bed unmade and the injection end of an IV drip lying in a puddle on the tossed blanket. To Jesse, this did not make any sense.
An hour earlier, when Brenda had been laid out here dead to the world, Jesse had stood in this doorway, watched the rising and falling of her chest and, despite a churning desire to spirit her away, did not have the heart to wake her. She had taken up post on a hardwood bench directly across from the room and, settling into the chronic pop and ripple of her own agitation, waited for Brenda to come around.
Facing the recently vacated bed, Jesse deduced the unthinkable—while waiting for Brenda to awaken, she herself must have fallen asleep, and now Brenda was gone. Shooting back into the hallway, moving left, looking right, Jesse collided with a woman, probably recovering from a cesarean, who had been inching her way along the corridor, using her drip stand as a staff. The woman staggered backwards, hooting in pain from the effort to regain her balance. Jesse cringed, whispering an apology through clenched teeth.
On the way to the nurses’ station, Jesse’s eye caught the color-shifting busyness of TV cartoons through the open door of the visitors’ lounge and then caught Brenda, sharing a stained cranberry-colored couch with an elderly black couple. Brenda was staring pie-eyed at the screen, her bare legs fanning under her thin floral-patterned hospital gown. On seeing her, Jesse felt a hum of fulfillment not unlike love. Thinking, How do I approach thee, she tiptoed into the room and sat lightly on the blond wood arm of the couch, her stomach lurching at the sight of the blood still lazily trickling from the gummy patch of forearm where Brenda had torn out her IV.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Brenda gestured weakly to the cartoons, addressing Jesse without looking at her. “I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore,” she wailed in a high, teary whisper, the two old people leaning away from her.
“Brenda, it’s OK,” Jesse murmured back, resting a hand on the nape of Brenda’s neck. The damp coolness that met her touch there was a jarringly discordant sensation at the end of this blistering day.
“You don’t understand,” Brenda continued in that cracked, whispery wail. “He’s everywhere, he’s everything. I can’t even close my eyes, he’s inside my eyes.”
Jesse dipped awkwardly from her perch on the armrest and embraced her, a sour scent of calamity rising from Brenda’s skin, a surge of inarticulate information leaping the breach. Suddenly Jesse felt woozy, felt herself filled with that buzz of connection again, that buzz of Home. “Tell me how to help you,” she asked q
uietly, honestly, as she pulled back from the clinch.
“I want my mother.” This brought softer looks to the faces of the old couple.
“Do you want me to call her for you?” Jesse asked, wanting a tangible task.
“She’s my mother. Why doesn’t she come for me?” Brenda wailed, ignoring Jesse’s offer, her eyes returning to the cartoons as she fingered the flimsy hem of her gown.
“She’ll be here,” the old lady intruded, putting a hand on Brenda’s pale, freckled knee.
“What did you have, a boy or a girl?” the old guy asked, his voice furry with kindness. He was dressed in shades of pink and maroon that clashed violently with the cranberry corduroy of the tatty couch.
“It’s OK,” Jesse answered for Brenda.
“He loved me so much,” Brenda said, rocking, looking up at Jesse for the first time.
Jesse tossed the wig bag onto an empty chair, turned her face from the sight of that bloody trickle.
“So much—”
“Brenda, stop,” Jesse begged.
“Did she lose her baby?” the old woman silently mouthed to Jesse, who nodded in assent.
“Who’s gonna love me now, huh? Who’s gonna love me now?” Brenda began to bang slowly on her thighs with limp fists, and the old woman, as if on cue, reached inside her husband’s sport jacket. She extracted a thin blue flyer, which she gently placed in Brenda’s hand. Printed above an open-armed image of Christ, the words A LOVE SUPREME were scrolled in a rainbow arc like the ornamentation on Heaven’s Gate, Jesse thinking, Christ; Brenda moaning, “Jesus.”
“That’s right.” The old lady nodded, then touched a knuckly hand to Brenda’s knee. “And you listen to me, ’cause I lost three.”
Exiting from the hospital on a steep side street, Jesse and Brenda had only to wait a few minutes before Ben floated past, Jesse envisioning her brother circling the complex since she had entered the main building more than an hour earlier. Brenda got in the rear and lay down along the length of the seat, curling into herself as if cold and staring at the seat back a few inches from her face.
“Karen said the meeting went very well,” Ben said quietly, so as not to disturb Brenda.
“What meeting.”
“With Lorenzo.”
“Who’s Karen?”
“The Friends of—c’mon.” Ben grinned painfully. “Play ball here, Jess.”
A half dozen blocks from the hospital, in a quiet neighborhood of federally funded prefab homes, Ben pulled up alongside Lorenzo’s sedan. Lorenzo was leaning against the hood, looking like he’d been waiting there for quite a while.
“Brenda, sit up,” Jesse whispered, reaching back to touch her arm.
Brenda made room for Lorenzo in the rear seat, the air inside the car instantly suffused with the funk of his exhaustion, his sudden presence causing Ben to pop out of the driver’s seat as if the vehicle could only hold one oversized person at a time. He wandered off a short distance to give them privacy.
“Jesse,” Lorenzo said. “Can you give us a moment here?”
“Sure.” Jesse reached for the passenger door.
“Can she stay?” Brenda quickly whispered, and Jesse felt that hum inside herself again, her hand returning to her lap. Lorenzo offered no protest.
“Brenda, I just met with this woman who runs a group that searches for missing children,” he said in a low, steady voice. “They have an excellent reputation. They’re called the Friends of Kent and they asked me if they could meet with you.” Brenda pressed the heel of a padded hand to her forehead. “Now”—Lorenzo touched her knee with a fingertip—“this group, they’re not looking for publicity. They’re strictly volunteer, but they’re very experienced. They know how to raise up a search party and they know how to find what they’re looking for.” Brenda slowly tilted away from him until her right temple came to rest on the window glass. Jesse watched Lorenzo absorb Brenda’s withdrawn reaction to his sales pitch.
In front of the car, Ben leaned against a tree trunk: Brenda hemmed in by giants.
“Now, these people, they want to come over and meet with you at your house, OK?” Brenda closed her eyes. “Brenda, this is your call, this is entirely up to you, you know, meeting with them, but I would recommend that you do. It’s like a whole army working on nothing but finding your son.”
Lorenzo gave her a long moment to respond. “Can I tell these people to come up and talk to you?”
“OK,” she whispered, shrugging. Jesse saw Lorenzo register that apathetic response too.
“Good,” Lorenzo said softly. “Very good. Now I won’t be with them, but I’d like to check in on you after they’re done—see how you’re feeling, give you an update on things, all right?” Brenda, her head still against the glass, appeared to be asleep. “All right, then,” Lorenzo said awkwardly, opening the car door.
Jesse left the car after Lorenzo and caught up to him as he was about to reenter his own ride. “They’re letting you do this?” Her voice was filled with misgiving.
“Who’s they…” Lorenzo answered heavily.
“The prosecutor, McDonald, whoever.”
“They got nothing to do with it. She’s a taxpaying civilian. She’s free to do whatever she wants.”
“OK,” Jesse said lightly, but she could see in his face, hear in his voice, the panicky impulse to make all-or-nothing moves. And she knew, absolutely knew, that Lorenzo had consciously kept news of the Friends of Kent, of Karen Collucci, from his bosses not because it was strictly a matter between civilians but because he feared that his superiors would nix the contact. Her hunch here was that he was counting desperately on Karen and her people to pinch-hit a homer for him. Jesse watched as Lorenzo fumbled with his car keys, and she felt as if she were witnessing him fall apart before her eyes.
“You trust her?” Jesse leaned into the driver’s window as Lorenzo finally keyed the ignition.
“Brenda?” he asked.
“No. Karen Collucci.”
Lorenzo shifted into drive. “About as much as I trust you.”
He tried to smile, couldn’t manage it, then rolled off.
They entered Brenda’s apartment building through the basement, that point of entry not without its gauntlet, but less so than out on Van Loon. They moved fast, Ben clearing a path. Once inside, Ben dropped back behind them to prevent any of the shooters from following, and Jesse and Brenda were up the stairs and inside the apartment before the news of their return could mobilize the great mass out in front. Brenda instantly fell out on the unmade convertible, facedown, one knee drawn up to her ribs. Despite the heat, Jesse felt the need to cover her with at least a top sheet, and as she brought it up to Brenda’s shoulders, Brenda feebly grabbed her wrist, whispered, “I have to make you a tape,” then fell asleep.
With Brenda down and out, Jesse began aimlessly pacing the room, reaching out and touching things—tapes, posters, tabletops, dishes—just touching as if the simple act of tactile connection transmitted to her some kind of sustenance or balm. Thinking back on her conversation earlier in the day with Jose, she recalled his asking her, challenging her with, “Are you in love?” In terms of the reporting required of her, Jesse felt in no danger of losing her focus. But she was very much in love. Again. She thought of all reporters, but especially street reporters, as junkies. And although there was a universal undercurrent of adrenaline running through each of them, the true drug of choice varied from writer to writer. There were those addicted to the information race, the desire to get there first—some of her colleagues lived crouched in the blocks round the clock, the pagers on their hips nothing more than starter’s pistols.
For others, it was a compulsive craving for the truth, not in any abstract or philosophical way or in any noble or public-minded sense either. These reporters suffered from an unquenchable desire to know what the hell happened, what really fucking happened here—why did it happen, when did it happen; who said what to whom and what was said in return; how did this blood truly ge
t here on this stoop, on this bed—the information most often serving no higher purpose than to relay the specifics with reasonable accuracy to the public and, more personally, to scratch that unappeasable itch.
There were those who got off on being around cops, around violence, around death, those who enjoyed living dangerously and getting paid for it.
And then there were those, and in this group Jesse included herself, who were addicted to something she thought of as the Infilling—the compulsive hankering to witness, to absorb, to taste human behavior in extremis; the desire to embrace, to be filled with, no matter how fleetingly, the power of human grief, human rage; to experience it over and over; to absorb the madness of others, the commitment of others, the killers, the killed, the bereaved, the stunned, the liars, the fuckers, the heroes, the clownish, and the helpless. Jesse needed these people to come inside her, to give her life, a life, and she loved them for it.
Like any other halfway decent professional, she had been called all the names—vampire, ghoul, bloodsucker, parasite—but it never bothered her, because she knew her love was ardent and true, like her love for Brenda, sleeping before her now in a twist of sheets, her chin thrust high, mouth agape, as if frozen midhowl, her exhalations punctuated by nightmare yips and moan fragments, her skin morgue-damp, almost blue.
The Infilling was the how and why of her love for Brenda—Brenda’s anguish, mortification, and insanity filling Jesse, like water taking the shape of its vessel; Jesse’s every thought, gesture, daydream, and impulse over the last twenty-four hours ringing with Brenda’s name; Jesse looking into a mirror to brush her hair, wash her face, and seeing Brenda, being Brenda, and knowing, at least for the time being, who she was.
Roughly an hour later, just as Brenda was beginning to come around, Jesse heard the trudge of footsteps on the stairs, the low murmur of multiple voices, then a knock on the door. Bolting upright, Brenda quickly but unsteadily got to her feet and, without asking for help, shoved the bed back into the couch. Jesse waited until Brenda was both seated and somewhat composed before she opened the door to Karen Collucci and four others, all but one wearing the red satin warm-up jacket of the Friends of Kent.
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