“Listen, I accepted three collect calls here while I was doing my homework.”
“Three?” Ray said, assuming that they were from the County Correctional Center: inmates were allowed only to call out collect.
“Just tell me when the phone bill comes in.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Still mainly focused on Ruby, Ray attempted to back-burner the fact that Danielle’s husband had his phone number.
“Thank you.” Danielle kissed him in front of Nelson, the kid spinning in place. “You’re something else.”
“C’mon,” he demurred, then those phone calls came rushing back in on him; Ray once again telling himself, in a fleeting moment of clarity, Get out of this now. But then Ruby returned to the living room; his anxieties shifted and the moment passed.
“Nelson.” Ray stopped him at the door and on impulse stuck his baseball glove between the kid’s arm and ribs. “Put a ball in there and keep it under your mattress when you’re not using it, OK? We’re gonna make an all-star out of you yet.”
The kid’s lips had continued to rise like bread in an oven, even in the time that it took to go from the parking lot back up to the apartment, rising so high that his eyes had become slits and Ray was unable to tell how he felt about this last-minute consolation prize.
With the apartment to themselves now, Ruby and Ray stared blindly at MTV, the sound still off. Ray felt leaden, a little breathless, almost afraid to cross the room and turn off the television.
“Dad?” Ruby struggled for a normal tone of voice, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Not that I care, but why did you give him your glove? It’s OK that you did, I’m not upset, but you just met her.”
“Him. Look, I felt bad for the kid, plus his father’s in jail, it’s like not having a father. He doesn’t even know how to . . .”
“It’s OK.” Her voice was starting to wobble. “I’m not upset, I’m just curious.”
“I felt bad for him, Ruby,” stopping there, not ready to go where he had to go now.
“Edward Bosco,” she abruptly declared through clenched teeth.
“What?”
“I fucking hate him . . .” And the tears finally came, although her eyes were still on the screen. “I just want to . . . I say anything, he comes up behind me in the cafeteria, repeats everything I say, but like ‘Nyeh nyeh nyeh nyeh,’” a viciously mincing singsong. “I just want to fucking kill him. Fucking school.”
“Ruby.” Ray slid off the arm of the couch, tried to take her hand. “Ruby, do you want me to stop seeing her?”
“What?” she squawked, horrified, the question so inescapably blunt. “I don’t care! Don’t stop seeing her because of me!”
“No no no, honey, I didn’t mean that.” Ray going mind’s-eye blind. “I would never do that. . . . Come here.” He attempted to gather her up, but she surprised him with a straight-arm—Ray feeling in it, the barely suppressed yearning in her to do violence to him.
“I’m OK! I’m OK!” she snapped, then swiftly backstepped out of his reach.
“OK.” Ray stepped off, his hands in the air. “Are you OK?”
“I said yes.”
Then, exhausted by the long and awful afternoon, she rubbed the tear-blotched skin beneath her eyes.
“Honey, let me ask you . . .” Ray speaking as delicately as possible, just wanting this to be over with. “Did you ever apologize to Nelson?”
“No.” She finger-raked matted tendrils of brown-blond hair away from her face.
“Why not?”
She opened her eyes, threw him what for her was a hard look. “It’s not my fault he catches like a bitch.”
Chapter 27
Field Trips—February 26
Nerese and her son stood silently in a chilling fog outside the Dempsy County Correctional Center with roughly two hundred other visitors, women for the most part, and kids, lots of kids; the few young men waiting to get in looking like they could just as easily be the visited as the visitors, including one tall goof whose mouthful of gold tooth caps kept falling out in ones and twos whenever he attempted to speak.
Not having the written permission of the police commissioner to make this trip to see her nephew Eric, Nerese had left her gun, shield and ID at home, figuring as long as she wasn’t recognized by any of the COs she’d be OK. And if, in fact, they did ID her, she could always try to plead ignorance of the rules, although with Antoine and Butchie racking up enough frequent-flyer miles in and out of this place for a free trip to the moon it would be a miracle if anyone bought it.
She had decided to risk this trip not so much for her nephew’s sake as for Darren’s. Having come home the night before earlier than expected, Nerese found herself walking into a living room adrift in malt liquor fumes, her son and three of his high school buddies playing at being players, sprawled on the couch, throwing back forties and clutching their nuts, a porno video playing on the TV.
None of that would have been worth more than the usual tongue-lashing and a grounding, although she also intended to call each kid’s parents; but when one of the boys shakily struggled to his feet, a nickel-plated .22 fell out of his pocket and all bets were off.
She wouldn’t go so far as to run him in; he wasn’t a bad kid as far as she knew, none of them were—but she did personally drive him home to show his folks what he’d been packing, and heard the satisfying smack of flesh on flesh before she had made it back to her car.
But even that wouldn’t have pushed her to make this dicey move here—the last straw was what Darren had said to her when she returned home and laced into him about his moron friend: “But Ma, it wasn’t even loaded. The bullets were in his other pocket.” So this visit was for his sake, a field trip to Christmas Future.
They passed the first checkpoint without much hassle—taking off their shoes and socks the worst of it—then got on the appropriate bus which would take them the three hundred yards to one of the eight residential pods that ringed the hub of the central intake center.
But coming into Eric’s unit there was a second frisk and check, this one more intense; fingers roaming the waists of their pants and underwear, then harrowing scalp and hair; a flashlight check of their mouths and the lockering of all extraneous clothing, coats, sweaters, shirts, everything down to a thin turtleneck for Nerese, and the sleeveless T-shirt beneath his pullover for Darren; socks and shoes examined again, and then they were finally, finally steered into the visitors’ hall forty-five minutes after getting on line. The space was a cafeteria-size room filled with narrow wooden tables long enough for fifty chairs on a side, the walls covered with inmate art: fantastical landscapes featuring unicorns, Conans and Xenas, interspersed with earnest portraits of Malcolm, Martin, Frederick Douglass and some Hispanic-looking men whom Nerese couldn’t identify.
There were no topside barriers between the visitors and the inmates, but vertical planks of wood bisected the world of knees and furtive exchanges from the underside of the tables down to the floor.
Inmates in groups of six wearing gray Velcro-trimmed jumpsuits and loafer-style sneakers or flip-flops were periodically herded into the hall and one by one allowed to survey the sea of family and friends, point them out to the CO and then head across the room, closely watched.
Nerese and Darren were directed to two chairs alongside each other midway down a half-empty table and began the wait for Eric.
Short, dark and stocky like his mother, wide-eyed, bud-lipped and with a high smooth forehead beneath a medium-length crop like his father’s, Darren sat straight-spined at the table, his hands clasped before him as if he were in a classroom lorded over by a fierce teacher.
Nerese, however, sat somewhat hunched over, covering her nose and mouth to fend off the sour stink of stress sweat and poor digestion that hung in the air of every prison she had ever had occasion to enter, over the course of her career and for a few years before that, during her adolescence, when she would grudgingly visit one of her brothers.
Many of
the inmates and their visitors, especially if the visitors were women, slumped forward, sliding their upper bodies across the tables toward each other as they spoke, forearms pressed into forearms, faces inches apart.
Heads would drop for consoling caresses, thumbs digging into tension-knotted necks and shoulders.
Children scrambled across the tables to climb atop their fathers while low-key conversations took place between the parents; the predominant vibration in this vast room filled with hundreds of the most ruthlessly violent and unstable men in the four incorporated cities and towns of Dempsy County was seemingly one of intimate sobriety, as if they had all been given hard time for predicate tenderness.
Nerese watched her son absorb the world around him, his expression deteriorating from rigidly composed to slack and hangdog, his eyes jerking from tableau to tableau as if his head were mounted on a rusted turret.
Next to them a huge acne-scarred inmate—Nerese recognized him from the Roosevelt Houses, his left eyebrow, nostril and lower lip pierced with hoops—cuddled his three-year-old son with unabashed delight while completely ignoring the boy’s slightly older sister, who sat next to her mother silently playing with a naked Barbie.
At the next table over, Darren focused briefly on a small Gypsy-looking gray-haired woman, her heart-shaped face held at an angle in the cup of her brown hands as she mournfully studied her toothless, tattooed son who was going on and on about something in a half-whispered rant, Nerese nearly able to smell the Crank boiling in his veins.
Turning his eyes to the newest group of six herded into the hall, Darren tracked one chunky inmate as he marched purposefully across the room to his seat and, without a word of greeting to the woman who had been waiting for him, turned his back on her and tilted his chin to the ceiling so she could get to work rebraiding his hair.
And then Darren caught sight of something that made him look as if he were losing his mind altogether: a woman seated across from her man at the very end of their table had sneaked her hand around the edge of the partition and was furtively yanking on his charcoal prick, which arched out of his open fly like the head of a turtle, both of them sitting there with their faces pressed into their forearms, as if as long as they appeared to be asleep they wouldn’t be caught.
“OK, here’s the thing,” Nerese said softly, her son jumping nonetheless. “You and your friend there with his ‘It ain’t even loaded’? If you ever wound up in a place like this, Darren, not only wouldn’t I help you out, but there is no way in hell that I would ever come to see you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
These were the first words spoken by either of them since they’d gotten on line outside the visitors’ entrance, Nerese as usual shaking her pup by the scruff, but she wasn’t even sure that Darren had heard her. He was breathing through his mouth, almost panting, his head continuing its jerky circuit from inmate to inmate, his eyes devouring faces, hands, tattoos. Whatever does the trick, Nerese thought, backing off and letting the pictures tell the story.
But thirty minutes later, when Eric was finally herded into the visitors’ hall at the tail end of a group of six, Nerese carefully studied her son’s face as he got his first look at his recently minted thug-life cousin and realized that she had made a grievous error here. What she had interpreted as fear in her son’s eyes was in fact, awe. What she had interpreted as revulsion was in fact, self-revulsion. Darren—she should have known this—so far from being the type of kid who would ever wind up in a place like this, had spent the last hour and a half surrounded by what his young music-video-molded mind imagined to be real men, hardcore to the bone; not constantly scolded mama’s boys like himself; and it made him feel like a punk.
Right now, a sit-down with Eric, who would be under tremendous pressure to come off like cold steel to his aunt and cousin in the presence of all these other inmates, would only make it worse for Darren. Deciding to cut her losses, Nerese rose from the table, and with her son in tow got the hell out of there before Eric could spot them, stopping just long enough to deposit a check for seventy-five dollars in her nephew’s general-store account, by way of apology.
Halfway home from County, with Darren mute and demoralized in the passenger seat and Nerese desperately trying to figure out how to salvage their disastrous field trip, her cell phone rang, and she wound up weaving across three lanes in her effort to locate the damn thing.
“This is Frederick Martinez.” Frederick, not Freddy, the voice cool and formal. “My parole officer said you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yeah, I do. Thanks for calling back.” Nerese whipped the car to the shoulder of the interstate, killed the radio. “Is there any way you and I can have a sit-down? I’d prefer explaining to you what’s going on face to face.”
“I know what’s going on,” Frederick not Freddy said, as a sixteen-wheeler ripped past them, its wind-wake buffeting the car.
“Can you meet me at the South Precinct sometime today? Anytime that’s good for you.”
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“All right. How about at your PO’s office? Same deal. At your convenience.”
“No. I don’t feel very comfortable there.”
Nerese hesitated; she could have his PO compel him, but . . . “Well, where would you like to meet?”
Silence for a beat, then: “In New York.”
“In New York?” Nerese sinking into herself, regretting having overplayed the solicitous routine. “Well look, what I want to talk to you about, it’s not that big a deal. Why go all the way to New York?”
“Because it gets a little close around here,” he said.
Darren blew air out of his cheeks, still beating on himself for not being a bad-ass motherfucker, an O.G. or whatever.
“You know, Mr. Martinez, first of all, you crossing over to New York is a violation of your parole. Second of all, I really don’t want to do this, but if I need to, I can have your PO compel you to come in and meet with me at her office.”
“Well,” he sighed, “I really don’t want to do this either, but if I have to, I can lawyer up as soon as I get off this phone.”
Nerese’s turn to exhale like a blowfish.
“Where in New York did you have in mind?”
Three hours later, in the shadow of the Forty-second Street library’s south lion, on a small plaza above the sidewalk and below the broad marble stairs leading to the entrance, were the immovables of a closed-for-the-season sidewalk café: six round metal picnic tables, each one pierced by the shaft of a collapsed umbrella, and an undulating chorus line of folded-up chairs run through with a heavy metal chain and secured to protruding iron rings in the low wall that bordered the terraced side gardens.
There were also a few chairs scattered about unsecured, and that was where Nerese found him, Freddy—no, Frederick—Martinez, sitting by himself in the deserted sidewalk café, one leg crossed over the other as he read the New York Times.
He was a trim, handsome man, a welterweight with short wavy blue-black hair, a goatee and a lean self-possessed face the color of old ivory. His wardrobe reflected his aura: crisp tan chinos, a maroon turtleneck beneath a black double-breasted leather car coat and unscuffed oxblood construction boots.
But the chair that he had unfolded for himself was positioned at some distance from any of the tables, and on Nerese’s second take, there was something about how he had chosen to create an absolute island of space for himself facing this busiest of New York intersections that made her feel there was perhaps a little too much self-consciousness going into this vision of self-possession.
Frederick not Freddy; Nerese decided to play this one here by catering to his inflated sense of dignity, at least at first.
“Mr. Martinez?” Nerese stood over him in the empty plaza.
He carefully folded the newspaper in quarters before looking up at her, silent, waiting for more.
“I’m Detective Ammons?” Then, in her awkwardness, “We talked on the phone?”
“OK.” He nodded then continued to sit there, calmly taking her measure.
She was starting to feel like an idiot now, standing before him as if he were behind a desk, the boss-man, Nerese having just been called on the carpet.
A thin four-inch whippet of scar tissue that wasn’t visible in his mug shot ran horizontally across his forehead midway between brow and hairline; most likely, she guessed, the first strike of that gym-cage death match.
“Do you think we could go somewheres?” Nerese asked, hunching her shoulders against the cold.
“I thought we just did,” he said.
Picking up one of the stranded folding chairs, Nerese brought it to the nearest table, then gestured for Freddy to sit opposite her. “Please.”
“I’m assuming you know Ray Mitchell,” she said, the collapsed umbrella like a cloth-draped spear between them.
“I’ve never met him, but I know of him,” Freddy said, crossed arms over crossed legs.
“You know what happened to him?”
“I heard he was hospitalized after some kind of assault.” Freddy took an unwrinkled twenty-dollar bill from his inside coat pocket, folded it and picked his teeth.
“How’d you come to know that?”
“How?” He slipped the twenty back in his pocket. “People talk.”
“People . . .”
He looked off at the Fifth Avenue traffic, then came back. “I didn’t do it. I know that’s what you expect me to say, but it happens to be the truth.”
Leaning one elbow on the table, Nerese waited for more.
“However.” He coughed into his fist. “Let me also add that, frankly, I’m not too broken up about it.”
“And why would that be.”
Now it was Freddy’s turn to stare.
“So I take it you’re aware of the rumors.”
“The rumors?” he said acidly.
Nerese held her peace.
“Yeah,” he said, looking away again. “I’m aware of the rumors.”
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