“Then why is it you’re walking around with a gun and talking about ‘bad feelings’? Would you rather be a cop or something?”
Somehow when she says all this, it doesn’t come off as bitchily self-righteous. It’s more like she’s young and into provocation. Pushing you a little, just to see where you really stand. That’s okay. In fact, it reminds me of somebody I used to know.
“Things are a little more complicated than you’re saying,” I tell her.
“So explain it.”
I scratch the back of my neck and think about it. “Sometimes you have to be your client’s friend,” I say finally, “and other times, you gotta be a hard-ass.”
I hear the whining sound of the elevator coming down the shaft. It stops a couple of floors above us.
“But when you blame Darryl, you’re just blaming the victim,” she says. Now I know who she sounds like: me, about a year ago.
“No, I’m not blaming the victim,” I explain patiently. “I’m blaming the guy who robbed the victim’s gas station.”
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “I’ll bet you treat your rich white clients exactly the same as you treat a poor boy from Harlem.”
It’s gonna be hard to ask her out on a date after this. I try to think of a way to turn the argument around.
“Look,” I tell her. “Why don’t you work with me on one of these violations? Then you’ll understand what I’m saying.”
She gives me a long, searching look. I hope what I said about Darryl King before didn’t sound racist. A lot of people think she’s white because of her skin tone, but I wonder if it just makes her more sensitive to slurs.
“Listen,” I say, using a softer voice and rubbing my eyes because the new contact lenses are still bothering me. “If you’re so sure this Darryl King is going to get a raw deal from me, you should report me to my supervisor.”
“And tell her what?”
“Tell her I’m being unfair and discriminating.”
She considers what I’m saying. “Your supervisor is Ms. Lang?” In other words, she’s asking, is your boss a black woman?
“That’s right,” I say.
She runs a delicate finger along the outer rim of her ear. “I don’t know,” she says distantly. “I don’t know.”
“Hey,” I say abruptly. “What do I have to do to get through to you?”
“What?”
“You know, I’m doing and saying all these things just to get you to notice me and you just look right through me.”
“Well, I …”
“You know something?” I say, putting a finger on my chest. “Every day I sit upstairs in my little cubicle and I talk to these people who’ve done these awful stupid things. And you know what I do with them? I give them a break. Each and every one of them. They’ve all screwed up terribly, and I give them another shot. So you know what? You should give me a break. All right? I haven’t even done a crime. I just want you to give me a fair first chance. That’s all.”
The dazed look Andrea’s been wearing through most of this speech turns amused. As the elevator doors open, she reaches over and shakes my hand. Her manner is grudging, but her touch is warm. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get her interested in me now, but I’m going to try anyway. “Do we have a deal?” I ask. “I mean, to work on the case.”
“Well,” she says as the elevator doors slide back together again. “I suppose everybody deserves a chance.”
21
“WHO IS THAT?” Darryl King’s mother asked.
“Just some kid,” Darryl grumbled. “Keeps following me.”
They were in a Harlem boutique/electronics store called Big Anthony’s. Eddie Johnson stood by the front counter, staring up at the surveillance camera. The security guard by the door paid no attention to him or the constant buzzing from the store’s alarm system for shoplifters. The muscular brown pit bull by his side strained at his leash and growled indiscriminately. Dozens of young men walked in and out of the store with ropes of gold chains and designer canvas jackets, which they wore off-the-shoulder style like 1940s movie starlets wearing mink stoles. A sleek soul ballad by Whitney Houston played over the public address system.
Darryl’s mother looked down at the jewelry case and slapped her son on the arm. “When’re you gonna buy me this necklace?” she said, pointing to a long, twisting chain of stones the color of rubies and sapphires.
“After you pay for my coat,” he said.
“You’re making money now too,” she said.
He gave his mother an uneasy look. At thirty-five, she was a rail-thin, hollow-cheeked, and snaggletoothed woman who had an even longer criminal record than her son. She had a pending indictment for criminal sale of a controlled substance in the seventh degree to go with her conviction for stabbing Darryl’s fifteen-year-old friend Mark. She’d started shooting heroin when she was thirteen, and now many of the veins in her arms, legs, and neck were dead and discolored from her needlework. Her career as a prostitute began a couple of years later, shortly after the birth of her children. These days she was often quiet and preoccupied, though she could turn vicious without warning. She lived for drugs, money, and her children, in that order.
“Hey, Moms,” Darryl said. “Look at this.”
She turned and saw Eddie Johnson making scary faces for the surveillance camera. When he saw Darryl and his mother glaring at him, he tucked his head down inside his unseasonably heavy blue parka and began to convulse. They couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying uncontrollably.
“Something very strange about that boy,” Darryl’s mother said.
“He just do everything he see me do,” Darryl explained. “He got arrested last year in the Bronx, ’cos he was throwing rocks at cars. And he just do it ’cos he see another kid do it. He don’t think for himself.”
His mother hugged herself and rolled her eyes. “Why you let him hang around?”
Darryl told her that Eddie Johnson had actually been moderately effective as a steerer and a lookout when they’d recently taken over two of Pops Osbom’s corners. Since that night he’d seen Pops at the Apollo, Darryl had been paying more attention to the family business. They’d made more than eight thousand dollars the next week and they were just getting started. Now he was starting to see the importance of little things. Like saving money and making long-term plans. Like the fact that tomorrow night, Eddie would be in the apartment next to Pops Osborn. He would give Darryl and the others the signal when Pops was alone and vulnerable. Then they could kill Pops and take over the rest of his locations, including the Fortress.
“Sounds all right,” Darryl’s mother said in a spaced-out voice.
There was a commotion at the back of the store. Darryl’s custom-made jacket was ready. It was made from smooth white leather. An eight-point star adorned the back and there was a large Louis Vuitton symbol on the front. The price was three thousand five hundred dollars. Big Anthony, the store’s proprietor, stood behind Darryl and draped the jacket over his shoulders as though it were an opera cape.
“I look nice,” Darryl said, studying his reflection in the store’s full-length mirror.
“Yes, you do,” said his mother. “Very handsome.”
Eddie Johnson came over and began to meekly pet the jacket. Darryl made a fist like he was about to sock him.
“Darryl, don’t,” his mother said. “He just wants to feel it.”
“Next, he’s gonna wanna wear it home,” Darryl complained.
“So what would be the harma that?” his mother said. “Didn’t I always teach you all to share shit?”
22
THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE long weekend goes slowly. I feel blocked and useless behind my desk, and I wish for the millionth time I had a window in my cubicle so I could at least see if there’s a sunny day going on outside. I have to settle for the photograph of the beach landscape on my wall.
This is one of those days when I long to be there. It seems like all my clients are trying my patience.
Darryl King doesn’t show up for his scheduled appointment, and to add to my frustration, Andrea gives me the cold shoulder in the hall when I come by her building to turn in some papers. And then there’s Scottie Austin, a short and jittery twenty-four-year-old mugger, who normally hangs around Port Authority but has just been arrested for robbing an old man in his Washington Heights building for twenty-five dollars.
Scottie has gotten all the breaks he’s going to get. “You’re definitely getting violated this time,” I tell him.
“But I didn’t do it,” he protests. He appears to be pulsating in his chair. A long dark scar marks the back of his hand and an even uglier one runs across his cheek.
“Oh yeah? What happened.”
“Okay. I’m gonna tell you what happened. Okay? This is what happened. Here it comes: The old man just dropped his money on the ground.” Scottie sits back and folds his arms, like he’s just finished a formal presentation.
I raise my eyebrows. “And then?”
“Yeah,” Scottie says. “He dropped the money twice. The first time I’m like, ‘Yo, whass up with this shit? You drop your money.’ And I give it to him. And he say, ‘No, I don’t want it,’ and then he throw it down again. So then I pick it up.”
“I find that very hard to believe,” I say, grimacing and examining the arrest report more carefully. “Especially since it says here the old man caught a pretty bad beating from you. You broke his nose and two of his ribs when you threw him on the ground. I think I’m gonna have to violate you.”
“Oh no. Don’t do that. I can’t go to jail. I’m not a career criminal. I’m a good guy.”
I flip back and forth through the two dozen pages in Scottie’s file.
“I’m just a jolly-going fellow,” says Scottie, sitting back in the chair and musing on his place in the universe.
“You’re a menace,” I say, closing the file. “If it’s not this arrest, it’s just gonna be something else. The scams you were pulling at Port Authority were bad enough, but then I look at your rap sheet and all I see is you getting arrested for more and more serious crimes all the time. And the reason is that you’re still smoking crack.”
“I only smoke crack at night,” says Scottie proudly. “And maybe in the afternoons. But only sometimes in the morning.”
“Why not then?”
“I gotta sleep.”
Maybe I’m getting a less tolerant attitude from hanging out with cops at the target range, but there seem to be more and more clients who get on my nerves the way Scottie and Darryl King do. It’s all these serious felons with serious crack habits. I guess, for one thing, it’s harder to empathize with them than with the other clients. What I really wonder is why anyone would want to smoke that shit. Don’t they have enough problems? I know I do.
I mean I did a little bit of experimenting with sex and drugs when I was in school, and I certainly still remember what it felt like the first time Jack Daniel’s took off the top of my head and let the pressure out. The only problem is, you can never quite get that first high back again. You have to try something harder each time. And eventually you stop feeling anything at all.
I’m just thinking about having a drink when Richard Silver walks in for his second appointment. He’s a little more casually dressed this time, wearing brown loafers with gold buckles, a new pair of chinos, and a white linen jacket. With his hands clamped in his pockets, like he’s carrying the most valuable lint in town.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi yourself,” he grumbles.
The last thing I need is a big fight with this guy to start off the long weekend, so I just get out the file. But flipping through my notes, I see I left a lot of items blank during our last appointment because he had me distracted.
He sits back, legs crossed and hands laced up behind his head. His eyes never leave me. If you were just taking a glance, you might think he’s waiting patiently. But I know that he’s just coiling himself up, like a cobra waiting to strike.
“We got a lot of things to cover today,” I say in the voice I use when I don’t want a client to trifle with me. “We never really talked about your current job or your community service requirement.”
“Is that so.” There’s absolutely no change in Silver’s expression.
“We never even talked about what you got convicted of,” I go on, needling him a little. “And I always ask people about that.”
Silver stirs an inch or two and clears his throat. “My conviction?” he says darkly.
“Yeah,” I say. “Your crime. Why’d you break the law?”
Silver smiles thinly at the insolence. “Why did I break the law?”
He gives me a sad, magisterial look that seems to say, oh, but only a couple of years ago I could have broken you in half and stuffed you in a garbage can. “Why did an untalented prosecutor have to get his name written in the newspaper with my blood?”
“That’s not really the point, is it?”
“The hell it isn’t. My one mistake is that I failed to properly delegate responsibility.”
“In other words,” I say, “you didn’t hire somebody else to get caught holding the bag. I mean what kind of sleazy shit was this? Paying off somebody from the Board of Estimate with a million dollars in a bowling alley and hookers in a hotel room? That’s just sad, that’s all.”
Silver’s reaction is hard to gauge. His eyes bug out a little and he rises about a half inch in his seat. It looks like he’s smothering an explosion inside himself. “Let me tell you …”
There’s a knock at the door. Two Puerto Rican boys stick their heads in.
“Yo, man, we waiting all day,” says the taller one, who wears a green hooded sweatshirt with nothing underneath.
The younger, smaller one wears a clean white shirt. He’s not old enough to shave, but he’s grown as much hair as he can on his upper lip. “We wait since lunch,” the young one says. “Now we miss lunch. You should buy us lunch.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Who are you?”
“You don’t know?” says the tall one in the sweatshirt, bouncing up and down with nervous energy. “Oh, man …”
“Gimme a break. I got two hundred and fifty other clients. I can’t know everybody on sight.”
“Morales, man.” The tall one puts his hand to the side of his mouth like he’s about to whisper something to me. “Unauthorized use of motor vehicle.”
I know the name and I vaguely recall seeing the tall one before. Silver stares up at the ceiling, holding on to a thought.
The two Puerto Rican boys keep bumping shoulders with each other.
I look for my master list in a desk drawer. “Both of you aren’t my clients, are you?”
“No, just me,” says the tall one in the sweatshirt. “This be my baby brother, but I take him everywhere I go so he don’t get in trouble at home.”
I hold up a finger. “Can you just wait outside a couple of more minutes please?” I ask.
“We not the only ones waiting, you know,” the taller, older Morales says.
The two boys leave, slightly annoyed with me. I write down the name Morales on a pink message slip and then turn back to Silver. “You were saying?”
“You know there’s a thing the old-time pols used to call ‘greasing the public weal.’” From the way he pronounces the words, the pun is clear. “Are you familiar with that expression?”
“Not entirely.”
“Either you are or you aren’t.” The birthmark on his eyebrow makes him look more skeptical than usual.
“Okay, I’m not.”
“All right,” he says, standing up and looking at my posters. “You got Bob Dylan on your wall. Here’s a little history lesson. This is what it was really like. The sixties. I’m in the City Council. You’re in Romper Room. Or something. Wetting your pants. Whatever. City’s about to blow up. We got war protesters up at Columbia. Martin Luther King getting popped. They’re going apeshit in Newark and Los Angeles. In the ghettos here too. We’re t
alking Mau Mau rebellion. They’re gonna burn New York down. What do we do?”
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to answer, so I light a cigarette without saying anything.
“Frankly, we paid some of those ghetto guys off,” Silver says, pointing and looking down at me like a college professor addressing a student. “A guy called Muhammed. Another one named Hakim. Threw everything at them. Money. Jobs. Grants. Know what? No riots in New York. You know what else? People who wouldn’t have had a shot were able to get civil service jobs and move to better places. Completely legal? Maybe not in every single case.” He smacks his right hand into the palm of his left. “Necessary for our survival? I think so.” He doesn’t mention Sullivan Houses, the low-income project he stopped supporting a short time later.
“By the way,” I say, leaning forward in my chair. “How did you do with those voters you paid off?”
“Very well,” Silver says, pacing back and forth and glaring at me combatively. “Call it gratitude.”
“That’s gotta be the highest-minded excuse for bribery I’ve ever heard,” I say. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you and your buddy went downtown to Bowlmor Lanes with a shopping bag full of money because you had a client who wanted to tear down some nice landmarked buildings on the Upper West Side and put up a condo …”
“The thing with Jimmy Rose was a serious thing,” Silver says loudly, interrupting me. “There is a lack of affordable housing in this city. My client wanted to build fifteen hundred new units. Go ahead. Smirk. I would make money. True. But it would be for the common good.”
He puts his hands together like a man begging for absolution. “Of course, the bureaucracy and the approval process move so slowly that it’s hard to get investors to hang in there. So Jimmy and me. We did it. We greased the public weal. Guilty as charged.”
Throughout the monologue Silver has been on his feet dramatizing, laughing, bullying. But when he gets to the part of the story where he gets convicted and his friend Rose kills himself, he seems drained. “You know the rest,” he tells me. “Crime and punishment … Am I gonna do it again? No. My friend is dead. My life is nearly ruined. Did I have to do it in the first place?”
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