Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  “So whatever happened to Henry Lee?” I ask.

  “He got shot in the head outside a rice paddy,” Bill says, casually throwing his cigar butt out the window. “So he shouldn’t have bothered worrying about the whole thing …”

  As we make the turn onto 125th Street, two things hit me. Number one is that there’s a lot more to Bill than I’d thought. Angel’s right about him: He talks tough, but he’s just as mixed up as the rest of us. I wonder if there’s some level of self-loathing going on when he calls black people “animals” and stuff like that. The other thing that strikes me is a vague sense of unease. But that slips out of my mind quickly as we pull up to a row of Senegalese peddlers selling umbrellas, wallets, and vinyl handbags on the sidewalk. From the Senegalese guys on my caseload, I speak enough of their native tongue, Wolof, to negotiate a good deal for Bill and Angel to buy their wives some nice scarves.

  Bill starts to give me the thumbs-up sign, but then the walkie-talkie on his belt blasts static. He picks it up, says a few words into the receiver, and then listens for a few seconds. He raises his bushy eyebrows at me and then signs off.

  “That was for you,” he tells me. “You’re supposed to give some cop a call.”

  “Oh hi, how you doin’, Mr. Baum. This is Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough from the two-five …”

  “Oh yeah, I tried to reach out to you before.” I put a finger in my ear so the noise from the street doesn’t drown out what he’s saying on the pay phone.

  “Your name is Baum, right? Not Byrne like you told Kelly?” I admit that’s true and McCullough has a good laugh.

  “’Kay, listen, buddy boy, you and your friend gave us a good tip there about this Darryl King guy. So the other day, we picked up an individual name of Edward Johnson in the Bronx. He’s like … not retarded, you know. Just weird. Anyway, the first point of the thing is this guy Johnson can connect King to those crack dealers who got popped in Harlem.”

  “That’s great,” I say. “Now you can put the guy away.”

  “Well, not so fast,” McCullough says. “This guy, Johnson, our informant. He’s had some problems with your people.” From the insinuating way he says “your people,” I wonder if he means the Jews.

  He soon disabuses me of that notion. “Johnson is on probation in the Bronx for a rock-throwing thing,” he says. “But he’s been a bad boy. He just got picked up again carrying an unregistered handgun and a quantity of marijuana. So that could get him … whaddyacallit?”

  I hear the click and put another quarter in. “Violated,” I say.

  “Yeah, violated.”

  “I think I catch your drift. He’ll cooperate with you if he can stay on probation.”

  “Kee-rect,” says McCullough.

  “However, you need to convince him that the threat of the violation and the revocation of his probation are real…”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll talk to my people.”

  I spend another quarter and call Ms. Lang with the information. She’ll call the assistant commissioner for the borough, who’ll call the assistant commissioner in the Bronx, who’ll talk to her branch chief, and eventually it’ll all come back to Eddie Johnson’s probation officer in the Bronx, who probably has no idea his client’s been rearrested. In the end, Eddie Johnson will agree to cooperate with the police and a warrant will be issued for Darryl King’s arrest.

  This puts me in a good mood, and I come bounding back to the car where Bill and Angel have been waiting patiently with these odd-looking smiles.

  “What’s up?” I ask as we pull away from the curb.

  “Well, we’ve been doing nothing but our cases the last few days,” says Angel. “So we went to your old supervisor Ms. Lang and got a couple of your old cases.”

  He hands me a file over the back of the seat. Richard Silver’s name is written in bright red letters across the top. I feel my face instantly start to crumple. “Oh fuck! I wanted to get rid of this guy.”

  Bill and Angel burst out laughing, as we pass a glossy waterfall of a high rise in the East Nineties and keep going down Second Avenue. I get a picture in my mind of Richard Silver giving me that patronizing raised eyebrow and I feel like getting out of the car right now. “What do we want with this case?” I ask.

  “He’s another one of your bad boys, Baum,” Bill says. “He missed an appointment with his new P.O. and still hasn’t done his community service requirement.”

  We pass a bus that has a picture of a girl who looks like Andrea in the scotch ad on the side. I wonder why she hasn’t been returning my calls and then I start to feel empty inside. I reach for my Silly Putty, since I can’t bear the stench of a cigarette with Bill’s cigar smoke in here.

  I glance through my old reports on Silver and see, for once, I haven’t made any serious spelling mistakes. “So he’s not getting violated?”

  “No. No. Just a gentle reminder to keep his appointments.” Bill checks his watch. We’ve been working for nearly ten hours and the overtime is starting to pile up. That may be the most important thing Bill and Angel have taught me: how to put in for overtime without drawing undue attention from your supervisor.

  “So we’re going to Sutton Place now, right?” Bill asks me, his brown eyes amused in the rearview mirror.

  “That’s the address Silver gave me,” I say, closing the folder just as I start to feel carsick.

  I ring the soft, chiming bell next to the mahogany doors of Richard Silver’s apartment and try to think of a snappy comeback to however he’s going to put me down. For a few seconds, “yeah, your mutha” are the only words that come to mind. One door opens and a stout Hispanic woman with close-set eyes looks me over and checks out Bill and Angel. She wears a white maid’s uniform and has no expression.

  “Hi, the doorman just rang us up,” I say. “Is Mr. Silver here?”

  Nothing registers on her face. I get a strong feeling that she doesn’t speak English. Then Angel talks to her in Spanish and she steps aside. We walk down a long foyer and into an entrance gallery with a marble floor and a high, rounded ceiling. The air-conditioning keeps the temperature comfortable, around sixty-seven degrees. To the left, a pair of ivory-colored doors with gold handles open with a sound like a thoroughbred’s hooves hitting the ground. An attractive woman with long brown hair stands there smiling. She wears a blue silk bathrobe and black high heels.

  “I’m Gloria Silver,” she says in a husky voice.

  We awkwardly introduce ourselves and shake hands with her. Up close, she still looks good, just a little older than she first appeared. At least forty-two, with sharp worry lines on either side of her mouth and a few rings around her throat. The skin under her eyes is a little tight, possibly from premature cosmetic surgery.

  “Richard isn’t in right now,” she says. “But please do stay awhile.”

  There’s something a little needy in her voice, and something else strange in her eyes. Flaky lady. She really wants us to stay. And she doesn’t even know us. We give each other confused looks. This whole trip downtown has been for nothing, especially since we could’ve gone home early today. After a few seconds’ hesitation, Angel and Bill excuse themselves.

  “Mr. Baum can handle this himself, ma’am,” Bill says. “We have to be off for the weekend.” I give them both irritated looks, but Bill just flashes a sly smile at me, like he’s saying, “Go get ’em, tiger.”

  Now I have to stick around for a few minutes, just to be polite. I decide I’ll ask a couple of questions about Richard Silver and leave at the first chance. She guides me through the living room into her den. The walls are covered in salmon silk moir and the carpet is a delicate Oriental tapestry. The tables and chairs are nineteenth-century French antiques. The Donahue show is just ending on the giant TV screen. She goes to the bar, picks up a crystal glass, and fills it with Sprite and ice.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asks me, and then nervously looks over at the maid, who is standing there, still absolute
ly expressionless, in the doorway.

  “Just water, please.”

  She fumbles around the bar until she finds the ice bucket and the stainless-steel pitcher of water. Haphazardly she pours it, and the maid doesn’t move an inch. “We’re just going to be in here a little while, Iris,” Mrs. Silver says to the maid. Her voice is tentative, as if she’s dying for the maid’s approval.

  Iris barely acknowledges that she’s been spoken to. She puts her hands on her hips, takes a deep breath, and then slowly walks away.

  “I think she likes you,” Mrs. Silver tells me.

  She must be kidding, I think. “I’m worried Iris is angry with me,” she confides in a low, anxious voice. “She gave me a look this morning as she was changing the bed …” She shakes her head and turns the TV volume down with the remote control.

  I sit down at the end of her long gray sofa. She sits a foot or two away, the slit in her bathrobe revealing a pair of skinny legs wrapped around each other. One black high heel wiggles on her foot. The scent of strong, expensive perfume is in the air; it reminds me of something much older women would wear to a funeral. A long, uneasy silence passes and she sniffs three or four times. I never would’ve thought Richard Silver was married to such a strange lady. I guess I imagined him zipping around town with a redhead in a sports car or something.

  “So what time are you expecting Richard to get home?” I ask.

  “I’m not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Our divorce was finalized last week.”

  “Huh … I mean, well … I’m sorry.”

  This whole scene is starting to get a little too strange for me. I try to figure out a way to get up and leave immediately. She looks me straight in the eye and starts singing, “Put the blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame …” She gestures for me to sing along with her. I smile nervously and look down at my water glass.

  After a verse or two, she stops singing. “I actually haven’t seen Richard in a few months,” she says. “Not since he took up with that blonde chippie …”

  I have no idea who or what she’s talking about. I didn’t know any of these things about Richard Silver before. But that just shows how little you find out about anybody from sitting in a cubicle with them for five minutes.

  “Do you know Richard well?” Mrs. Silver is asking.

  “Not really.”

  “Richard is a very … dominating personality,” she says, scratching a spot near the side of her nose and then leaving her finger there. I pray she’s not about to start picking it. “He’s very good at getting something when he needs it. Of course, you know he did very well in our divorce.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, my dear, he should have.” She straightens her spine. “He paid off the judge and my lawyer …”

  Oh boy, I think, she is really nuts. “It looks like things didn’t work out too badly,” I say in a voice that’s supposed to settle things down so I can leave gracefully. “After all, you got this great apartment …” I rock back on the sofa and prepare to flee.

  “But that’s all I got,” she says, raising her voice suddenly and bitterly. “That and a lousy thirty-five hundred a month for alimony and child support. How am I supposed to live on that? I ask you. Do you know what Richard did?! He went to …”

  Her voice is just a decibel or two shy of hysteria when Iris the maid appears at the door again. This time her lips are pursed and her eyebrows are raised.

  “Oh, Iris,” Mrs. Silver says apprehensively. “Everything is just fine.”

  Iris leaves again, without a word. “What do you think she meant by that look she just gave me?” Mrs. Silver asks.

  “I have no idea.”

  As she chews her knuckles and talks on frantically, I start to get a glimmer of understanding. Mrs. Silver doesn’t work. The signs are that she stays in the house all day, thinking about her divorce. I mean, it’s past five and she’s still in her bathrobe. Other than her son, Leonard, who’s in school all day, the only human being she sees on a regular basis is her maid, Iris, who speaks no English. So in Mrs. Silver’s mind, they’ve built up an intense, complicated relationship. Days can be ruined by the tilt of Iris’s head or an ill-timed cough.

  In an odd way, Mrs. Silver reminds me of some of the poor women I’ve worked with. It’s that same sad inertia. Getting up late, watching television all day, no good reason to look forward to tomorrow. From the way she keeps rubbing her nose, I have to wonder whether she isn’t doing as much cocaine as some of my old clients. Of course, she can afford to languish in much more pleasant surroundings than her counterparts on public assistance.

  “And now, Richard is trying to turn Leonard against me,” she’s saying about their son as she finishes her Sprite and fixes herself a vodka tonic. “It’s a terrible strain on a boy his age …”

  I start to say something about leaving again, but she’s already ruminating obsessively about another sordid point in her divorce proceedings.

  “I knew Richard was running around even then,” she drones on, lighting a cigarette and letting the ash fall down the front of her robe. “And he always had those shady business deals, like the ones he has now …”

  Something about the offhanded way she says this catches my attention. “What shady business?”

  “Well, like the money laundering,” she says, clearly not as interested in that subject as in Richard’s philandering. “He always liked blondes …”

  “Wait a second,” I say to her. “Are you telling me you think your husband’s involved in money laundering?”

  She looks offended. “Of course,” she says, throwing back her shoulders and pushing out her chest. “I can prove it too.” She walks off on swaying hips and disappears into another room.

  This whole thing sounds like a crock and I’m anxious to get this afternoon over with so I can go home and feel anxious about Andrea not calling me. And Darryl King running around. Finally, Mrs. Silver comes out of the bathroom. She seems to be in much better mood now, like she just got high or something. The high heels are gone, and she’s put on a blouse with a floral design and a dark skirt that looks just a little tight on her. I notice a lipstick smear across her front teeth.

  “Hi, handsome,” she says in a loud party girl voice. “I have something special for you …”

  She shows me two large shoe boxes she’s been holding behind her back. She offers them to me, but when I reach for them, she backs away flirtatiously. She sashays across the carpet in her black-stockinged feet, singing “Put the Blame on Mame” again.

  “What’s in the shoe boxes, Mrs. Silver?”

  “Gloria to you, big boy.”

  “Okay,” I say. “What’ve you got in those shoe boxes, Gloria?”

  She’s on her knees on the other side of the room, opening a black oak cabinet and turning on some electronic equipment. There’s a soft hiss from hidden speakers and then a steady wallop of drums playing in four/four time. Gloria is on her feet, dancing with a shoe box in either hand.

  “Got to go disco!” she cries out as the song begins.

  It’s a shopworn old Bee Gees tune I haven’t heard since Saturday Night Fever came out. She sings along in a silly falsetto and does twirls around the carpet. She’s really getting down and getting funky, but who am I to criticize? It’s a tough job, but somebody has to be nostalgic for the 1970s.

  “C’mon, D-A-N-C-E!” she shouts. “Are you gay or something?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve slept with gay guys,” she says with not entirely sensible confidence.

  As the song ends, I manage to get one of the shoe boxes out of her hands. What’s inside is like a bag person’s treasure trove. Old, torn-up receipts, inky credit card carbons, and photocopied bank statements from accounts in the Cayman Islands. “All this is supposed to have something to do with money laundering?” I say.

  “I started making copies of everything back in the seventies, when Richard was in the nightclub bus
iness,” she explains, standing behind me and breathing on my neck. “Richard even put some of the accounts in my name. I just thought it might come in useful one day.”

  I don’t know about that. It just seems to be an incoherent blizzard of old documents to me, most of them with the name Goldman Resources, not Richard Silver. “Why didn’t you use any of this in your divorce case?” I say, giving her the shoe box back and putting my hands in my windbreaker’s pockets.

  “My lawyer wouldn’t enter it as evidence,” she says, following me around the room. “He said it was too hard to follow. Can you imagine? I only found out later that Richard paid him off too. On the first day, he told the judge …”

  She starts to drown me with more obscure details about her divorce but I hold up my hand. “Wait a second,” I say. “I looked at those papers just now and I don’t think I could follow them either.”

  “But you didn’t even try,” she says, flopping down on the sofa and pulling out some of the documents. “It’s all right here.”

  I have had enough of this insanity for one day. It’s time to go home and get drunk. “You know, even if I take the information you have here, it’s probably not going to get you a big divorce settlement or anything,” I say. “It’ll just mean giving your ex-husband a tremendous pain in the ass.”

  She sits right up and her eyes brighten, like this is the happiest moment of her week. “Do you think so?” she says. “Do you really think so?”

  41

  ON THE NINETEENTH NIGHT in a row with a temperature of ninety degrees or more, a dozen New York City police officers gathered in the plaza outside an East 116th Street apartment house.

  One of them, Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough, carried a warrant for Darryl King’s arrest for the murder of Pops Osborn and his bodyguard. It had been a long day. Sweat began to seep through the armpits of his yellow T-shirt as he looked in the file and saw a note from Darryl’s probation officer, Steven Baum. He described King as “psychotic” and said “he scares me.” McCullough smiled to himself, thinking it did not take much to scare these social worker types. He wondered why this Baum thought he had enough psychological training to call somebody psychotic. The guy sounded like a know-it-all on the phone. Maybe it was worth writing a piece about the proper role of probation officers in police work.