“They are,” Rashaad said imperiously, some of the other kids sucking wind, checking out Ray to see if he’d take that as an affront; but he was too busy racing the anxiety clock.
“Anyways, this cop did what he could until he ran into some trouble himself, legal trouble.” Ray edited out the nine consecutive life sentences for contract murders on behalf of various New Jersey crime families.
“Nonetheless, by the time Jackie was twenty-five, he had been supposedly drug-free for over a year, he was engaged, had even reconciled with Stubby. In fact, Stubby had got him an apprentice card with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which meant very good money and solid job security back then. Still does, in fact . . .
“But the night before Jackie’s wedding, April 23, 1965, a tragic mystery came about which at this point in time I can safely say will never be solved.” Ray was back to enjoying himself.
“April twenty-third, three a.m. Jackie’s brother Benny rings our doorbell, we were living in Hopewell by then, wakes up my parents.
“Apparently earlier in the day, Jackie had had an argument with Stubby, stormed out of the house and vanished.
“So around midnight Benny had been sent out to track his brother down, which basically meant hitting all the old dope spots, hunting down all of Jackie’s allegedly ex-running buddies, and checking out all the emergency rooms. No Jackie anywhere. Finally he had called the county morgue at Dempsy Medical, described his brother over the phone, blond, six-four, two-thirty, the morgue said, ‘Yeah, we got someone like that, come on down and make an ID.’
“And so Benny had come to our house, I couldn’t have been more than five, six years old at the time, to ask, to beg my parents to go with him to the morgue because he just couldn’t bear to see . . .
“Well, they all went, and yes, it was Jackie on the slab; an overdose.
“And then Benny turned to my parents again. ‘I have to go home and tell my father. Could you please come with me.’
“So somewheres around sunrise they all go to Stubby’s house to break the news. They walk in and the first thing they see is that all the hallway mirrors are covered with sheets. And when they come upon Stubby in the living room? He was barefoot and sitting on a wooden crate, had a skullcap on his head, a yarmulke. He was sitting shivah, which is what Jews do when they’re in mourning for a family member.
“They had come by to break the news, but Stubby was already set up. He looks at them, says, ‘He’s dead, right?’ He just knew.
“Stubby lived another twenty years, but to the day he died he never told anyone what he and Jackie had argued about that made him so sure that this kid was going to go out and basically kill himself right before his wedding.”
The class seemed drawn in, just one girl scowling at her nails.
Mrs. Bondo’s face was an arrangement of downward-pointing arrowheads, looking as if she was having an incredibly difficult time keeping her mouth shut.
“And so, for me, if I was in this class? What I would probably try to play around with, would be to imagine the conversation that took place . . .” And here Ray faltered, sensing in the pit of his gut how wildly inappropriate this “example” was, the whole saga so complex, lurid and melodramatic. “The, the conversation that took place between this mean little bastard . . .” The class flinched at his language, but Ray was too wretchedly embarrassed to care. He couldn’t believe that Bondo hadn’t shut him down halfway through this mess. “The conversation between this psychological child abuser, who after years and years of being hurtful and hateful to this poor overgrown kid growing up under his roof, was now finally, finally trying to do the right thing by him . . . and the kid himself, an emotionally screwed-up, con-man junkie jailbird hustler. What went wrong? Who said what to who that would make my cousin go and fall off the earth like that right before his wedding?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to get married,” Altagracia, the girl studying her nails, said.
Myra, the smart quiet one, raised her hand. “Well what do we write about if no one in our families has a drug problem?” Saying it with just the right balance of innocence and dryness to zing it right in there.
“It’s just my family tree,” he said lamely. “You know, one of the shakier branches.”
Mrs. Bondo fleetingly smiled down at her folders and that minute, almost secretive smile gave him some insight into her discomfited restraint; she had made the difficult decision to let the students deal with him and his sprawling drug drama on their own, trusting that at least one of the kids would rise to the occasion and set him right.
He felt chastened but also fascinated; he couldn’t imagine being in possession of such restraint himself.
Nonetheless he wanted a second shot at getting it right; had to get it right.
“OK, what do we have, ten minutes? Forget that story. It’s too, it’s too everything. Real quick—here’s a snapshot from Hopewell back in the day, a real bite-size quickie, no beginning, no end.
“Growing up, there was a guy in my building, a black guy named Eddie Paris. Eddie was a motorman on the PATH train, and he had two girls, I forget their names, and two sons, Winston and Terrance, who everybody called Dub and Prince, don’t ask me why. Prince, the oldest kid, was really something else. He went to Incarnation, the Catholic high school on Hurley Street, number one in his class, Honor Society, captain of the track team, which came in second in the state one year, captain of the fencing team, you know, competitive dueling, and on top of everything else? He could sing. And I mean sing—not hip-hop not head-banger not rock and roll but sing . . .” Drawing blanks.
“He would give concerts. Recitals. Anyways, a snapshot. 1976. I’m sixteen, high school junior right here at Paulus Hook. Prince is a senior at Incarnation. On this particular spring day I’m in my bedroom doing my homework, and I hear an argument down in the street. I look out my window and it’s Prince and his dad, Eddie Paris, down there, lots of hand waving, lots of shouting, and Prince, this great, great kid is . . . He’s got tears running down his face.
“And I hear Eddie shouting at him, ‘If I could I would, Terrance, but I have four children, not just you so I can’t.’
“At which point, Prince grabs his head, turns and, still crying, he just starts running blind up the Hopewell hill, this track star kid flying like a rocket, bawling his eyes out. And that’s it. Just that . . .” Making them come to him.
But shy, incurious or simply too spaced out from the first story, they didn’t take the bait, and it killed him.
“OK. Three minutes left. Your first assignment. Go home and find a photograph of someone in your family, Mom, Dad, Grandma, the cat, whoever. Except that the photo has to have been taken before you were born. And I want you to write me something involving that individual and what I want to know is, where did they go, what did they do right after the photographer said thank you. And don’t ask. Make it up. Use what you heard about them from back in the day. OK?
“Two minutes. I have some good news, I have some bad news.” And Ray brought up a number of paperbacks, spread them out across the table. “One to a customer, from me to you. That’s the good news. Bad news is that you have to read them. No book report, just read it.
“And let me just say something about these particular books. They’re mostly written by people who grew up without the advantages, some in cities, some rural—hard lives all around. And, the reason I chose them for you was because I feel that we read to learn new things, sure, absolutely, but more often than not, what we really get out of the good books we read is self-recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn’t know we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And this self-recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing and a little more connected to the larger world.”
There was a uniform glaze out there, and, worried about boring them, Ray picked up the pace.
“OK. So what we have here is James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Harlem poor churchy hellfire kind of adolescence. Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children. Southern poor cracker-country racism, 1920s, ’30s. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men. Great story, great writer, but mainly in there because us white guys got to represent. Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street. Growing up Hispanic in Chicago. Poets. Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight. Afro-American. El Bronx Remembered. Growing up Hispanic in some outer borough of New York, I can’t remember which, and last but not least, Best Loved Horror Stories, in there for whatever, OK? When I say three, everybody take a book. One, two . . .”
And on “three,” six students lunged for Best Loved Horror Stories.
“Whoa.” He removed it from circulation. “Again. One, two . . .”
And six books were gone, both Hispanic books taken by black kids, the girl Altagracia holding the copy of Uncle Tom’s Children by the corner and glaring at Ray as if she had been unfairly bumped in the first round of musical chairs.
What was he supposed to do? Shrugging, he slid her the collection of horror stories.
Myra, the girl with the big glasses, was the only kid not to take a book.
“Aren’t you going to take any?”
“No thank you,” she said almost inaudibly, holding up a paperback copy of Spoon River Anthology. “I’m already reading something.”
“Good for you,” Ray said mildly, this kid most definitely The One.
Out in the hallway, Ray walked with Mrs. Bondo, her heavy purse and armload of manila folders.
“I hope you didn’t mind the Bondo-Bello crack. I just wanted to loosen everybody up.”
“No problem,” she said, looking straight ahead, navigating the hyped-up foot traffic coming in both directions.
“I’m sorry about that story with my cousin. I kind of got carried away.”
“It’s life.”
“So . . . Was that OK?” Ray going fishing.
“Was what OK.” She grabbed the back of some kid’s shirt who tried sprinting past them. “Slow down, Malik.”
“The class. Was the class OK . . .”
Mrs. Bondo took a long time answering. “So why was this Prince kid running up the hill?”
“God, I thought nobody’d ask,” Ray said. “Terrance, Prince, he’d just gotten accepted to Dartmouth but they hadn’t offered him a scholarship and his father was telling him that he couldn’t afford the tuition, and that the poor kid would have to go to Rutgers-Dempsy and commute from home.”
“That’s where I went,” Mrs. Bondo said. “Rutgers-Dempsy.”
“Oh yeah?” Ray said brightly, his cheeks burning.
But then she added, “That has got to be one of the saddest stories I’ve heard all week.”
“So was the class OK?” Ray asked again, and again she was a long time in answering.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she began, then looked directly at him. “It might be helpful for you to understand that the kids are actually more afraid of you than you are of them.”
Chapter 5
In the Field—February 11
Ever the gent, short and stocky Bobby Sugar emerged from the bathroom still knotting the drawstring of his sweatpants, a rolled Newark Star-Ledger between elbow and ribs.
“Let’s get down to it,” addressing Nerese waiting for him at the dining room table in his cheaply but newly built townhouse apartment. “Let’s do it.”
Although Nerese still thought that the fastest way to make some headway on finding out what had happened to Ray was to work on his daughter, before she committed herself on this one she just needed to make sure that his noncooperation wasn’t masking something best left in the dark, that she wasn’t about to go to bat for a drug dealer or a pedophile or someone with any number of other disqualifying occupations or enthusiasms.
And although she and Sugar had had their share of beefs in the past, in the three years since his retirement from the Dempsy PD he had become a first-rate gagger, one of a rarefied breed of PIs who, by creating dozens of false identities for themselves over the phone, could assemble a portfolio as thick as the Bible on anyone living or dead, without ever having to leave their apartment.
To various police departments around the country, to the IRS, to credit retrievers and to innumerable banks, he was an FBI agent doing a workup on a suspect. To the Central Insurance Bureau, he was a fraud investigator from Blue Cross needing a history of claims. Referencing the staff rosters of every public and private hospital from New York to California, he was an affiliated doctor compiling the medical history of a new patient; and to former employers he was either an executive headhunter needing off-the-record feedback on a potential recruit, or a political campaign manager doing a background check on a new volunteer.
The secret of his success, especially with the evening at-home calls to former employers and sometimes even neighbors and relatives, was that Sugar, like any halfway decent detective or journalist, knew that once you got people talking, the problem was to shut them up.
“So how’s the kid,” he asked, sliding into the chair across the table from her, an open box of Dunkin’ Donuts and a plastic punch bowl filled with off-season candy canes between them.
“Darren?” Nerese shrugged, tore off half a doughnut. “Darren’s Darren.”
Looking out the window over Bobby’s shoulder, she saw a Chinese restaurant cheek by jowl with a funeral home, four lanes of two-way traffic tearing up the blacktop down there like time was money.
“Neesy.” Bobby leaned over the dinette table, chest hair sprouting from the V neck of his T-shirt. “The thing to remember with kids? Is that they tend to outgrow themselves.”
She nodded as if in deep acceptance, although she had a hard time envisioning her son outgrowing anything save for his clothes. Nonetheless, in the last few years whenever Bobby Sugar had something to say about children Nerese always made a point of opening herself up to it.
This had not always been the case; in fact, when they had first worked out of the same detectives squad in the mid-nineties, whenever Sugar had occasion to open his mouth on anything, Nerese more often than not had been inclined to put her fist in it.
In October of ’95, when the O.J. verdict came in, Sugar had gone apoplectic at Nerese’s lack of outrage; Nerese dismissing his smokescreen tirade at the sorry state of American justice as what a friend of hers called soft bigotry. But when O.J. was finally nailed in civil court, they had actually wound up throwing punches in the squad room after she came in to work and found that he had plastered her desk and locker door with torn-out “Guilty” headlines from every newspaper in the New York–New Jersey area.
In response to her calling him a Ginny-assed redneck motherfucker that day as she was being dragged away by two other detectives in the squad, Sugar had pulled himself together, smoothed back his hair, readjusted the knot of his noose-yanked tie and said, “I’m not a racist. I’m an empiricist.”
Because she was embarrassed that she had no idea what that word meant, his declaration went a long way in momentarily cooling her off; but after consulting the dictionary that night, she came in the next day saying, “Empiricist, my ass. Some people just see what they want to see.”
After that, the two of them had barely made eye contact until the day, a year and a half later, when her then twelve-year-old son was rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix while she was stuck on an extradition assignment, picking up a fugitive rapist in California.
By the time she finally made it to the Dempsy Medical Center a full day and night after the surgery, she found Bobby Sugar at his bedside, the two of them watching a game show on the ceiling-mounted TV. Later, she’d found out that, knowing Nerese’s mother was in the hospital herself at the time and that her brothers were not exactly go-to guys, Sugar had taken it upon himself to be her very frightened boy’s stand-in parent, and had spent the better part of the last thirty-six hours pretty much holding Darren’s hand.
And for that, he could have waltzed in from the john wearing a Klan hood and cracking a bullwhip and Nerese would have done nothing more than call him an asshole before going back to work on the assorted doughnuts.
“Ready?” Sugar asked, reaching for a manila folder on the windowsill. Nerese opened a reporter’s pad.
“OK. Raymond Randolph Mitchell, born ’60 married ’91 divorced ’95, one kid Ruby Draw-Mitchell born in ’90. Last six addresses: 644 Broadway in New York, from ’88 to ’94—his ex and kid are still living there—10 Jones Street in Greenwich Village, from ’95 to ’98, then big move, 1330 La Cienega in West Hollywood, ’98 to the fall of ’01, then back to New York, the Gramercy Park Hotel mid-September to mid-October of the same year, then from there to current, residing in Little Venice at 44 Othello Way, right here in Dempsy. Questions? Comments?”
“Go ahead,” Nerese said, her pen motionless, suspended above the pad.
“OK, criminal—nothing on the NCIC computer, but you know that. And, checking in with One Police Plaza, with Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Dempsy County prosecutors offices and with the LAPD, there’s nothing, no open complaints, nothing charged then dismissed. Also, there’s no litigation, no torts, nothing in civil court and no tax liens.
“On medicals . . . No hospital admissions except for, you know, the present situation: no rehab clinics, no methadone maintenance, no psychiatric admissions, no HIV therapy and no lab work—blood tests, X rays, EEGs, EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, nada.
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