Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  “You smoke too much of that shit,” Bobby said, following him.

  “Don’t go judging me, Bobby. That’s fucked up.”

  26

  ON TUESDAY MORNING, I’M coming up the hall to my cubicle when I notice my door is already open. Immediately I start thinking somebody must’ve broken in and gone through my papers. There’s been constant tension between management and the union these past few weeks, and all kinds of weird things have been happening. As I get closer, I hear papers rustling and a chair squeaking inside my cubicle, so I know whoever it is still is in there.

  I pause outside the doorway and wonder if I should go get help in case things get rough. But decide it’s my office after all, so I come belting in, shouting, “What the hell is going on in here?”

  Andrea Clinton almost falls off my chair. Her papers go sliding off her lap and flying on the floor. “You frightened the shit out of me,” she says.

  “Sorry,” I say, bending over to pick the papers up. “No one’s supposed to have a key for this office except me.”

  “Your supervisor let me in,” she says. “I told her I had a surprise for you.”

  I know she can’t mean this the way it sounds, and I look at her carefully.

  She’s dressed a little more casually today, in a blue oxford shirt and a khaki skirt without stockings. Her ponytail is tighter than before, giving her a severe, judgmental look. Like she’s so beautiful that she doesn’t have to forgive the people who cross her. The rest of us can’t afford a lot of grudges, because life’s too short. You have too few friends. But a truly gorgeous girl can write off anybody, because somebody else will always be interested. I better watch what I say here.

  My stomach’s jangling as she hands me the file without looking at me. The top sheet is a new “hit notice” generated by the New York State Identification System computer in Albany. It says:

  King, Darryl. Male. Black. NYSID #04606670N. Eighteen years old. Originally sentenced to probation on June 2. The above individual using the name Daniel Kane was re-arrested on July 4 for a crime committed earlier that evening. The charges were attempted grand auto theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, burglary third-degree, possession of burglary tools, and resisting arrest.

  “Shit, man,” I say, checking out the rest of the file.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” she says coldly.

  “Why should I be?”

  “It proves you were right about him all along.”

  True enough, but in another way I’m kind of disappointed. There’s no denying that Darryl’s a bad guy, but I was looking forward to trying to turn him around. It would’ve been a challenge, kind of like a hunter getting a prized lion’s head to go over his mantelpiece. But now that will never happen. Maybe just as well though, I think, looking at his file.

  “He was trying to steal an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme,” I say, checking the arrest report. “I guess the arresting officers charged him with everything they could think of. Where is he now? Are they still holding him?”

  “Look at the next page,” Andrea says in a curt voice.

  The next page says Darryl was arrested two nights ago by officers from the 25th Precinct, and then arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court before he was released on his own recognizance.

  From this point on, it should be cut-and-dried. Darryl was arrested and now it’s my job to go to the judge and tell him that he’s a violator who should go to jail. But I notice Andrea looking upset. I hope she’s not going to hit me with that white-man’s-justice-black-man’s-grief argument again. I feel myself tensing up inside at the thought of fighting with her.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “What’s the matter?” she says. “What’s the matter is that they gave this guy probation in the first place.”

  I take off my windbreaker and squint at her like I can’t believe I’m hearing her right.

  “How could anybody let this guy go?” she says. “Didn’t they look at who he was? Didn’t they see what he’d done?”

  I can tell she’s about to launch into a full-fledged rant, so I cut her off right away. “Wait a second,” I say. “The other day, you were giving me a hard time about the way I was talking about my clients.”

  “Well, that was before I saw the rest of this case.”

  Andrea has come up with the files for both Darryl and his mother, Kimberly, including her conviction for stabbing Darryl’s fifteen-year-old friend Mark. “I heard about this,” I say, turning the page.

  She’s also managed to get hold of Darryl’s previously sealed juvenile record, which says Darryl has been arrested at least four times a year since the age of twelve for muggings, beatings, joyrides, sexual abuse, chain snatchings, and drugs. The earliest recorded incident happened when he was six, just after he was placed in a foster home. He was on his way to his first grade class one day when he found a hypodermic needle on the sidewalk outside the school. He took the needle into the classroom and began stabbing his little classmates. He was sent home for a week and then taken to a counselor.

  “It’s like he’s one of those guys with the extra Y chromosome,” Andrea says furiously. “He just loves to do crime …”

  I know just what she’s feeling right now. I remember the first time one of my clients left my office and went right out and did another crime. It felt like a bucket of cold water in my face. But as I’m reading Darryl’s file, I sort of get a sad feeling too.

  “Look at the kid’s mother,” I say. “They had to take him away from her when he was six and put him in a foster home.”

  “Yeah, but look at the report; she got him back when he was twelve.”

  “That’s still a long time,” I tell her. “A lot of bad things happen to kids in those foster homes … and where’s his father? He never really stood a chance.” Just the old social worker in me talking again.

  I guess I feel sorry for Darryl in an abstract way. When I think about the guy who was actually standing here, bellowing out his insane fantasy, I get frightened and angry.

  Andrea has also uncovered the obscure detail that Darryl King was once nicknamed “Dooky.”

  “I gotta remember that,” I say. “I always like to know people’s nicknames.”

  Andrea frowns as I look at the arrest report for the recent case, which involves Darryl’s attempt to break into the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked near East 124th Street. The name of the arresting officer, Ron Kelly from the 25th Precinct, is typed at the top. “Let me give this cop a call,” I say. “If you can get the arresting officer, he can give you some nice details to put in your violation report.”

  She hands me a cup of coffee as I dial and listen to the phone ring at the precinct. You almost never get these cops the first, second, or the third time you try because they all have these weird schedules. I leave one message for Kelly, and then a half hour later, Andrea and I go down to the legal department and try him again. This time we get lucky and the sergeant catches Kelly going out the door for the day.

  There’s a sound like the receiver being beaten with a hammer and then he picks it up. “This is P.O. Kelly,” he says with a raw Queens accent. “What can I do for you?”

  I look over at Andrea, who’s listening in on an extension a few feet away, and quickly explain who I am. I ask Kelly if he can spare a minute to tell me about Darryl’s arrest.

  “Ah, I don’t know about any of this,” Kelly says. “Didn’t you get what you needed from the D.A.’s file?”

  “Sometimes an arresting officer can pass on the kind of detail that will convince a judge to lock a guy up.”

  There’s a long pause. Background noise roars on his end of the line. “You know,” Kelly says finally, “the relationship between your department and our department is not the most cooperative in nature, if you hear what I’m saying.”

  I give the phone the finger and mouth “Fuck you” several times while Andrea looks on, appalled at what he’s telling me. Some cops hate probation officers beyo
nd reason. They’re sure that we’re protecting criminals and that we love putting them back on the street after they arrest them.

  There’s also an element of class snobbery. A cop’s starting salary is about ten thousand dollars higher than a probation officer’s; the gap in pay and benefits increases with each year on the job. So a lot of cops don’t like to consort with lowly social workers.

  “Maybe you should have your superiors reach out for my superiors,” Kelly says. “Let them sort it out.”

  “Oh, c’mon, man …”

  “Hey, that’s the way it is … yeah, just a minute, I’ll be off,” he yells to somebody else at the precinct. “Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Baum?” Kelly’s voice grows fainter as he prepares to put the phone back on the hook. Andrea shakes a fist in frustration at the phone.

  Figuring I got nothing to lose, I try one more angle. “That’s Byrne,” I say.

  “Your name’s Byrne? Not Baum?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Kelly says in an I-didn’t-know-you-were-an-Irish-guy tone. “Hold on just one second, I got that mutt’s file right here.”

  Andrea’s mouth drops open and she has to cover her receiver as she begins laughing hard. When she regains her composure, she gives me a thumbs-up sign.

  Kelly reads the notes about the arrest. Just after midnight on Sunday, they arrested Darryl King and another young man named Robert Kirk trying to break into an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked near a big housing project by the East River. I smile and put my hand over the receiver.

  “Bobby ‘the House’ Kirk was his codefendant on the gas station robbery,” I tell Andrea in a soft voice. “He violated another condition of his probation by hanging around with a ‘disreputable person’ like Bobby. We can use that in the hearing.”

  I scribble notes as Kelly goes on to say that Darryl was carrying a sharpened screwdriver. He took a swing at Kelly when he was arrested and used “abusive and threatening language,” though Kelly won’t or can’t give me the exact words.

  The hearing for the arrest is a month and a half away, so Kelly’s worried that my violation proceeding will ruin his collar. I assure him it will be okay.

  “So how’d you pick him up?” I ask now that we’re on slightly more friendly terms. “Were you just going by the building on patrol?”

  “Oh no, we were already up there as backup to the homicide detectives. We just saw this guy King and his buddy getting behind the wheel of the car when we came out.”

  “Oh yeah?” The air around me suddenly seems to get very still. “So what was the homicide up there?”

  “Ah some fuckin’ thing,” Kelly says. “They killed two of the fuckin’ crack dealers who were running the fuckin’ building.”

  I flash on the thing that Lloyd Bell was telling me the other night at Junior’s: that Darryl’s friend was trying to firebomb some crack dealer in Harlem. Because of the hazy way Lloyd told me the story, I’d just let the whole thing hang out in the back of my mind.

  “Who’d they arrest for the murders?” I ask, letting him hear the urgency in my voice.

  “They didn’t catch anybody yet. They found a pile of clothes in the apartment with the bodies and a forty-four with the prints wiped off near the incinerator down the hall.” He lowers his voice. “It sounded a little hairy up there. A lot of blood and Chinese food lying around.”

  “Did you ask Darryl about the dead guys?”

  “Whaddya,” the cop says, “that kid’s just a car thief. That’s not his thing, killing people.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say as forcefully as I can. “The kid came into my office wearing a beeper, like he works for a dealer. He was acting out, like he was gonna get violent. So that’s one thing. And then the other day I heard a story about his friends setting fire to a crack house uptown. You caught him across the street from a drug killing. It doesn’t seem so stupid to me to bring him in and ask him about it. He might at least know something.”

  Andrea nods as if the idea makes sense to her too. But Kelly snorts. “You hear about all kinds of things you’re on the street long enough.”

  This time, Andrea is giving the cop the finger into the phone. “Okay,” I say. “By the way, which detective caught the homicide case?”

  “I think it’s McCullough upstairs. Or somebody. Yeah. Detective Sergeant McCullough. You want me to have him call you?” Kelly’s tone is getting remote and bored now.

  Andrea is gesturing that she wants to take care of this part of it. “Yeah, would you?” I tell Kelly. “I’d appreciate it.”

  I put the phone down and ask Andrea what’s up.

  She’s already fussing with her hair and rolling up her sleeves like she can’t wait to get to work. “I’ll go see Detective McCullough,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Well, maybe now I have something to prove to you, Steven.”

  27

  “I STILL DON’T BELIEVE you tried to break into the wrong car,” Joanna Coleman said to her brother, Darryl.

  “And got arrested,” his mother added. “Don’t forget he did that too …”

  “Didn’t you visualize what would happen?” his sister said, pointing to the book Visualize Success on top of the TV.

  Everybody else started laughing as Darryl stared dumbstruck at the letter from his probation officer telling him to show up for a violation hearing. “I don’t visualize taking no more of this shit,” he muttered, ripping up the paper.

  They were back in the narrow apartment his mother shared with her grandmother Ethel, Darryl, and occasionally, Darryl’s girlfriend, Alisha, and their two small children. Ganja smoke drifted through the wind chimes suspended over an unmade sofa bed by the window. Joanna’s boyfriend, Winston Murvin, who had watery red eyes and long dreadlocks, held up his hand and waited for them to be quiet.

  “Now listen up all you people,” he said. His light Jamaican accent made the last word sound like “pee-pell,” even though he was from Jamaica in Queens, not the Caribbean island. “I am going to show you how to do this once and only once, then that’s it.”

  Winston asked Aaron Williams to bring over the bag of cocaine he’d taken from Pops Osborn’s apartment. Aaron put the bag on the table next to a hot plate, a large bottle of water, and a yellow-and-red box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. A slow reggae song lopped along in the background. Joanna and Winston’s two kids did a silly, arm-swinging dance on the bed a few feet away.

  Darryl knelt down by the side of the table. Winston put the bottle on the hot plate and turned it on. Then he dropped the baking soda and the cocaine into the water. “This is how you do it when you don’t have a tank of ether to use for the purifying,” Winston explained.

  It seemed to take a long time for the coke to boil down to its oily base. The baking soda sopped up its impurities. What was left, after Winston added cold water, were hard white balls of cocaine base.

  “This is a business like any other business, mon,” Winston told the assembled group. “We live by the law of the supply and de demand. So don’t be getting high on our supply.”

  “’S right,” said his girlfriend, Joanna, staring accusingly at her brother, Darryl. “Just like any other business.”

  “And the ones who come out on top are the ones who understand the laws of the economics,” Winston went on. From the incantatory way he was speaking, he might’ve been talking about the world of spirits instead of the business of selling cocaine. “Now we can buy a kilo for thirty thousand dollars from our friend in Miami. And what does that mean?”

  Darryl looked at him and shrugged uncomprehendingly.

  “That means we have at least a hundred and twenty thousand worth of crack,” Winston explained patiently.

  Darryl smirked and waved his hand. “I know all that,” he said.

  The Jamaican gave him a cool, level glare. “Then why are you not in business for yourself, Darryl, mon?”

  Darryl got embarrassed and didn’t say any
thing. He hated getting disrespected in front of the whole family like that. He wondered if it would be possible to kill Winston without everybody getting pissed off at him.

  “Remember,” Winston was telling everyone. “The first sample you give the customer must be the purest hit he’s ever had. That way he’ll keep coming back for more.”

  “Then you step on the shit with baby laxative or inositol,” Darryl’s mother added helpfully.

  “Thank you,” Winston said. “That is the first rule for any salesman. Get the customer hooked on your product.” He glanced over at Darryl. “Will you remember all of this later, Dooky?” Winston asked mockingly. “Are you a good student?”

  To show his disgust, Darryl made a ticking sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and then he refused to look at the Jamaican. Darryl’s girlfriend, Alisha, sat by the television rocking the baby to sleep. The older child, Toukie, was running back and forth with Joanna’s two kids.

  Winston spooned the white balls onto a sheet of paper on the table. He showed Darryl, Aaron, and the others how to measure the hardening coke and chop it into chunks the size of a penny. “And that is what we call cracks,” the Jamaican man said, like a magician revealing a trick.

  “Gimme some of that shit,” Darryl said, stuffing a couple of chips into his glass pipe and flaring his huge butane lighter.

  “Darryl, mon,” Winston said. “You’ll never get rich that way.”

  They laughed again. Hours went by. Darryl, Aaron, and Bobby took turns with the crack pipe. Alisha took the two children back to her mother’s house. Darryl’s mother chased her grandmother out of the apartment, once more telling her that Darryl would beat her old face in if she didn’t stay out of the way.

  As she came back in and settled down on the unmade sofa bed, Darryl’s mother talked about how the local dealers used to test the purity of heroin in the old days. “They’d find theyselves some junkie and take ’im back to the apartment, and shoot ’im up, and if they threw up and got all sick, they knew the shit was good,” she said.