“Can you imagine,” Longway began. “Can you imagine if, if a black child. A black child from Armstrong had been abducted—was said to have been abducted—somewheres in the city of Gannon. Can you imagine the police department of Dempsy raiding that city in an effort to save that child?”
“Hell no!” Rainey exploded, Longway’s son levitating off the floor.
“No, you cannot,” Longway seconded.
“I hear you,” Jesse murmured again, writing. Then she cut him off, the rest of his speech, asking, “So what’s going to happen tonight?”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Eight o’clock, nine o’clock, ten o’clock, midnight. In the physical world,” Jesse pressed. “What is going to happen?”
Longway hesitated, the question not on the dance card for now. De Lauder, losing interest, returned to working the phones. Rainey and the jumpy kid looked to Longway, waiting, like Jesse, for his response.
“Off the record?” he finally said in a more intimate tone, a sideways tone, and Jesse shut her notepad. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Nobody knows,” the Reverend Rainey added soberly.
“What do you think’s gonna happen?” Longway’s son asked her, drawing the stares of Rainey and his father. Before she could respond, the kid, suddenly blushing, quickly headed for the door, where he bumped into a teenaged girl on her way in, the swift exchange of irritated clucking noises between them informing Jesse that they were brother and sister. The girl handed Longway a fat envelope, then left.
“Can I put it this way?” Jesse asked gingerly. “What, where, what do you think you’ll be doing after the presser?”
“Trying to, to get this city to call itself to account,” the Reverend Rainey volunteered. “But without any more people of color getting hurt.”
“We’re gonna try to keep it cool,” Longway added as he opened the envelope, which was stuffed with cash, “but maintain the heat”
Jesse nodded as if enlightened.
“We’ll attempt,” Rainey said, “to keep it under control, to keep it lawful.”
“Attempt,” Longway muttered, as he dumped the money on the desk. “That’s the million-dollar verb here.”
Jesse nodded to the crumpled mound of cash, small bills, mostly tens, fives, and ones. “For bail?”
“Yeah, I’m an old Boy Scout,” he said as he began counting, his lips moving silently to the cadence of the math. “You know, ‘Be prepared.’”
Halfway to a councilman’s storefront office over on JFK, Jesse had a flash of how this next interview would most likely go and, rather than put herself through the ordeal, she had Ben pull to the curb. There were five people she wanted to hit on before the press conference, but as she sat there going over the list the whole exercise seemed like a waste of time. Jesse felt that she could almost make up her own quotes—attribute them at random to the various players and just feed the whole shebang over the phone to Jose without getting caught.
There was only one peripheral player whose responses she felt unable to predict: Felicia Mitchell. A sit-down with Felicia could be a wild ride, because Jesse was almost sure she hadn’t received one of those heads-up phone calls from Lorenzo. And depending on how deep the word had gone out into the street by now, she might not have heard about the discovery of the body, Brenda’s arrest, or any of it.
Jesse had Ben turn around and head for the Jefferson Houses. They hit heavy traffic—a three-car pileup on Route 13—and she spent the extra travel time phrasing and rephrasing her questions and disclosures, fretting over the right tone and wording of the bombshells she was about to lay in Felicia Mitchell’s lap, trying to find the line between sincerity and opportunism that would allow her to walk out of there, once she was finished, with her head still on her shoulders and her sense of shame still in its cage.
It was four-twenty, and as Jesse entered the Study Club’s double apartment, she saw that the rooms were almost deserted. Felicia was there, gazing out a window in the Pool Table Room, an aide was stowing away arts and crafts material in the Homework Room, and four children were huddled around a lime-green screen in the Computer Room. Looking puffy-faced and distant, the head of the Study Club stood with her back to the door and peered out at the late afternoon haze as if it were the northern lights.
“Felicia?” Jesse crossed the room and came up alongside her at the window. “I’m Jesse Haus. Remember me?”
“No,” she said too quickly, meaning yes. Jesse couldn’t read her blue mood, gauge what, if anything, she knew. “I just came from Lorenzo; he sent me over and…” Jesse peered down the shotgun row of rooms, looking for an empty one. “Could we…” She gestured down the line. “It’s really important.”
Surrounded by four walls’ worth of dos and don’ts, they sat on child-sized chairs in the Time-Out Room, their knees higher than their laps.
“What,” Felicia said numbly.
Jesse hesitated, then took the plunge. “Felicia, they found Cody’s body.”
“His body?” She sat forward, allowing herself the fleeting luxury of incomprehension.
“He’s dead,” Jesse said, grimacing.
“Huh.” Felicia grunted, stunned, taking stock, reading a poster on the wall, then abruptly spewing out a sob, as if her mouth had exploded—just one, a bitter blast of grief fading into a shivery intake of air. “Oh, that sweet child…”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse said softly, feeling like shit.
“Sweet…” Felicia shook her head, breathing through her mouth now. “Brenda,” she said, exhaling heavily. “Oh Jesus. Does Brenda know?”
Jesse was momentarily rocked. Having assumed that Felicia would instantly make the connection, she scrambled now to figure out how to phrase it. “Felicia.” Jesse took her hand. “Brenda’s under arrest.”
“What?” she said quietly, disbelievingly “She loved that child.”
“It looks like it could have been an accident,” Jesse said, sounding to herself like an undertaker smoothly offering his condolences.
“No.” Felicia sat up, closed her mouth. “No. She loved him. I see parents, I see them with their kids all the time. All the time. She loved him. No.”
“She confessed, Felicia. To Lorenzo.” Jesse leaned forward. “Cody might have drunk something—you know, ingested—when she was out of the house.”
“No.” Felicia just not going for it. “I’m sorry.”
“She comes back, sees the boy, gets crazy, gets scared, doesn’t tell anybody, makes up that story”
“No.”
“She confessed, Felicia.” They sat in silence for a long moment, Jesse peeking at the time: five-forty “She confessed.”
“So all this with the carjacker…” Felicia’s gaze was trained somewhere over Jesse’s shoulder.
“She confessed.” Jesse watched as the facts set up house, Felicia sinking back imperceptibly into the tiny chair—a subtle curling of the spine, as if air were escaping from a small puncture in the gut.
Finally, Felicia looked directly at Jesse. “She must have been so scared to do that. Tell that story and stick to it.” She was forgiving Brenda, Jesse the shocked one now. “She loved that boy so much,” Felicia said, letting herself cry.
Two of the remaining children came up, stood solemnly before Felicia, and ceremoniously, one by one, shook her hand. Unnerved by her glassy, teary state, the kids exited the Time-Out Room and then the front door, casting disturbed glances over their shoulders as they left.
“Do they know?” Jesse asked, thrown by the handshakes.
“No,” Felicia said in a weepy whisper. “The kids got to shake somebody’s hand before they leave, so we know when they’re gone for the day.” She sank into her thoughts again. “But they’ll find out soon enough, huh?”
Jesse braced herself, trying to get up the stomach for the next blow, debating with herself if she even needed to go on—was allowed to go on—given that certain information was decreed off-limits to her.
&nb
sp; “I have to go,” Felicia abruptly announced, rising to her feet, and Jesse just said it.
“Felicia, do you know where Billy is now?”
She paused, turned, sat back down, and, after a quick moment of mental leapfrog, asked a simple question. “Did he hurt the child?”
“No,” Jesse said, grateful for the big jump. “Didn’t sound like it.”
“Brenda,” Felicia said in a voice filled with revelation, “Brenda.” Then, looking directly at Jesse, she said it again: “Brenda,” as if hammering a nail through a fact.
Leaving the high-rise that housed the Study Club, Jesse walked out into the late-afternoon heat, passing a fistful of teenagers perched on the top slat of a bench, all of them engaged in some kind of verbal dogfight. Jesse understood only every other word or so, keeping her head down and heading for the curb.
“Yo, yo, miss.” Jesse turned to the voice, a boy with the left leg of his jeans rolled to midcalf. “You a reporter, right? I know you.”
“Yeah?” Jesse shielded her eyes from the sun.
“She gave it up, right?”
“Who…” Jesse making him spell it out.
“Who…” he repeated, in an acid drawl. “She gave it up.”
“I can’t say.” With her hand above her eyes, Jesse looked like she was saluting him.
“You don’t know? Or you can’t say.” Another kid pitched in. Jesse shrugged as if she didn’t understand the question. Two and a half more hours until the official announcement.
“Nah, man,” a third kid said. “That would be like all over the place by now.”
Jesse walked on, thinking, It is all over the place by now. She heard one of the kids behind her mutter, “Bitch,” but wasn’t sure if he meant her, Brenda, or both of them.
A plastic Pepsi bottle went whizzing over her left shoulder as close to her cheek as a butterfly kiss and landed in a bobbling dance on the pavement several feet ahead. Jesse stopped, began to turn around, thought better of it, and—back tensed, braced for the possibility of another missile—casually escaped from the Jefferson Houses.
25
Lorenzo hung up the phone and checked his call list. Just two names left: the presidents of Invictus and Aspira, the black and Latino police associations. He needed to secure guarantees that some of their members, on their own time and in civilian clothes, would hang in at Armstrong and other potential flash points tonight. He hoped they could help keep things calm, although he assumed both organizations would balk at his request that everyone make the scene unarmed.
Just two more calls, then it would be time for his interview with Billy Williams, who had been stewing in solitude for a good forty-five minutes now.
When Billy had been brought into the Southern District station house at about three that afternoon, Lorenzo had told the detectives who’d picked him up to dump him in the interview room. Then Lorenzo had purposely left him in there unguarded, as if he wasn’t worth the manpower it would take to baby-sit him.
While Billy sat staring at the walls, Lorenzo had continued working the phones, bullying, cajoling, begging, threatening, and lying to anyone he thought would help him keep the peace tonight. He promised all sorts of shit to people—civilian review boards, summer employment programs, neighborhood rehab initiatives, instant funding for pet development projects, more police, less police, and, the wildest promise of all, the introduction of ceiling-mounted video cameras in all five station houses, instituting around-the-clock film surveillance of in-house police conduct. No one was really falling for any of Lorenzo’s cotton-candy promises, but most of the players responded positively, as he knew they would. They tacitly understood that something could be obtained from someone down the line, the city’s day-to-day survival being largely underwritten by a vast and pervasive favor market.
Lorenzo made those last two calls on his hit list, ran some cold water over his face and scalp, then finally entered the interview room. Dropping heavily into the caster-footed chair and slouching down low, he gave Billy Williams a long, smoky look. “I oughta smack the shit out of you right here and now,” Lorenzo muttered, sizing him up. Billy sat humped over and wretched, his clasped hands locked below his knees. “We could of had this thing sewn up tight, twenty-four hours ago.” He let that sink in, working with long silent intervals for maximum claustrophobia.
“Twenty-four hours. You know what that boy looked like when we dug him up? You wouldn’t even know he was ever human. Ever a child. Skin all, like, glossy, black”—making an educated guess—“peeling, stinking, bloated, gaseous. Got, like, maggots living in every orifice in his face and body.”
Billy sighed, his clasped hands dropping toward his ankles. Lorenzo noticed that the tape recorder was cracked from Brenda’s flip-out, one battery still on the floor. He’d have to snatch a fresh machine once this preinterview was concluded.
“You left him there. You left him there an extra twenty-four hours than had to be. You left him there, and you let Armstrong go all to hell an extra twenty-four hours than had to be, because when I came up to see you, you just plain turned to shit on me, talking about, respect, talking about—what was it?—emasculation. Emasculation. Man, you got that right, ’cause you sure as hell didn’t have the balls to talk to me like a man. Tell the truth to me like a man.
“Look,” Billy began gingerly. “You don’t, you don’t have to psychologize on me like I’m some kind of homey.” He cringed at his own words. “I’m a college-educated individual. You know, for whatever it’s worth.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Lorenzo lazily slung his chair from side to side. “Was I talking beneath you?”
“No, I’m just saying—”
“See, because I’d think even a ignorant illiterate—” Lorenzo shut himself down, not liking this particular line of hectoring. He sat up, rolled in close. “Let me ask you something… How did I treat you the other night, huh? Did I fuck you over? Did I disrespect you? I get an assault complaint like that, I’m supposed to come in and take you off to County, but I didn’t, because you seemed to me like a reasonable, intelligent individual. I mean, I could’ve walked out of there and you could’ve turned around and beat Felicia half to death, and I would’ve been the one with his balls in a bear trap ’cause I let you slide. I trusted you. I trusted you with my job. See, but you messed up. You should have trusted me like I trusted you, because right now? I got some bad news for you, my man…”
“What…”
“Brenda? She’s been charged with homicide. That’s a done deal. But New Jersey? There’s no accessory status in this state, so you’re gettin’ charged with homicide too.”
“What?” In his panic, Billy began to unbutton his shirt.
“You should’ve opened up when you had the chance, boss.”
“You think I what?” Billy rebuttoned his shirt, opened it again, his fingers flying up and down as if he were playing a clarinet. Lorenzo hoped he was good and soft now, unable to dissemble: nobody was really interested in Billy except as a fact checker for Brenda’s story.
“Yeah, we had her in here and she opened up like the Yellow Pages. That’s why you’re here, Billy.”
“Oh, come on.” Billy’s voice went liquid, his fingers crinkling the knees of his slacks now.
“The thing is,” Lorenzo said, leaning in, an ally, “you got only one weapon to help yourself with, brother. Same one you always had. Except that weapon, it’s getting less, potent by the hour. You know what that weapon is?”
Billy stared at him, as if he had no fucking idea what Lorenzo was talking about.
“The truth. You have the truth. But you tell me something after I found it out for myself? It don’t count. It don’t count. You got to come up with the new news, boss. You got to tell me something I don’t know, and that’s why that weapon’s getting weaker and weaker. ’Cause I’m learning shit about what went down; I’m takin’ in all kinds of information, and your data pool is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. So you tell me something fre
sh, you make me a believer. That’s the only thing you can do for yourself, Billy, and you best begin like, now.”
Billy couldn’t speak, Lorenzo’s Halloween routine having done too good a job. Lorenzo would have to help him get it in gear.
“Are you a killer?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then how’d that boy die?”
“She said he drank some medicine.”
“She said that?” Lorenzo began taking notes.
“Yeah. She called me at the apartment. Felicia’s apartment.”
“Said…”
“Said the boy you know, he was dead. She was hysterical.”
“Did you believe her?”
“Yeah, I guess I did. She was all sobbing. You should’ve heard her. It was—”
“What else she say.”
“She said, oh man, she said that I had to come over, she’s, like, all alone in the world, I’m her only friend, she can’t touch the body. And I’m, like, ‘Brenda, you got to call the police, Brenda.’ She says she can’t, begging me to help her. I say I can’t do that. She says if I didn’t come by she’d kill herself, and I’m like, ‘Now, wait a minute,’ you know? I mean we had just broke up like two hours before, so at first I was thinking maybe she’s scamming me, trying to get me to come over, so she could, like, get another shot at putting us together again, so I said, ‘Just call the police.’ She says, ‘I’ll kill myself,’ and I just hung up but, like, I had this feeling right after… You know, Brenda, she’s a serious person, she doesn’t play like that. And it just didn’t sound like something she’d cook up to…It sounded too crazy not to be real, so I called her back and—” Billy abruptly took five from his story, his face crumpling, shifting so effortlessly from sobriety to tears that at first Lorenzo thought he was simply imitating Brenda on the phone. Then he bawled, “Homicide,” a hopeless wail, and Lorenzo knew to get parental, shift to Big Daddy.
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