I get out a yellow legal pad and write down number one. Finish those fucking law school applications. I’ve already made a stab at beginning an essay: “Having toiled for two years in the bloody, squalling emergency room of New York’s criminal justice system, I now believe I am ready for specialized surgery …” Needs work, but it’s a start. Number two is cut back on my drinking, as it’s giving me a bad headache right now and clouding my thinking. Which leads me to number three: see Andrea again. Thinking about her is making me a little nuts. If she doesn’t want to see me again, then so be it, but I have to hear it directly from her. Especially if there’s a chance I can talk her out of it.
Number four is even more impractical, but it feels good to get it out of my head and on to the page: Find Darryl King and bring him back. I keep having this fantasy about what it would’ve been like if I’d been there for his big shoot-out with the cops. At least then no one could’ve said I didn’t try.
For the moment, I decide to skip to number three and try to find Andrea. I’ve left a dozen messages for her over the past week without an answer. I always tell my clients it never does any good standing around waiting for life to happen to you, so I shower, get dressed, and go over to her house on the Upper West Side, unannounced, at eight o’clock.
Of course, the doorman in her old limestone apartment building says she isn’t home, so I have no choice but to stake out the entrance of her building from the Mexican restaurant across the street. I know this sounds bad and maybe a little sick, watching her house the way the Field Service guys watch for a probation violator. But I need to see her so badly that it’s like an itch inside my heart. I can’t do anything else, except think about her.
The waitress comes over to take my drink order. She’s cute, with long blonde hair and a low-cut blouse, and she gives me a big smile. But compared to Andrea, she doesn’t do a thing for me, so I just order a Coke.
She brings over a basket full of chips as I keep looking out the window at the entrance to Andrea’s building. At about a quarter past ten, I see a girl about her height come out of the lobby and toss her hair in that sexy way I was hoping to get used to. My heart starts to pound. Cars cruise by with their headlights throwing crucifixes of light across the restaurant’s window. For a second, I lose sight of the girl coming out of the building. But then she steps out into the street light, and I see that she’s white. I lean back in my chair and sip my Coke. Between Andrea and Maria Sanchez, I don’t know what’s up with me and girls who aren’t white. Even Barbara Russo was kind of Mediterranean-looking. I wonder what a shrink would make of that. Or my father.
A mariachi band plays on the speakers and the waitress tells me that one of the specials is enchilada suiza, just like at the Tex-Mex place where Andrea and I had dinner that night. The man and woman in matching pin-striped jackets at the next table are talking about commodities futures. I get scared that Andrea might be out with Joel, the nasty yuppie she mentioned. Maybe all she’s interested in is money. If that’s so, then I never really stood a chance with her.
Another waitress comes by and asks me if I’d like to try the house margarita. With the mood I’m in, I have to hang on tight and say no. If I start drinking now, I’ll be truly lost. I nurse my Coke for another fifteen minutes, and then I see someone I’m sure is her coming around the corner. I slap a five on the table and go running out. She’s already crossing the street by the time I get outside. I go racing after her, as the light changes to red. A car almost hits me and the driver gives me the finger. I catch up to her on the corner and lay a hand on her arm.
“Steve,” she says in a surprised tone that makes it sound like she’s not sure if she likes the name or not.
“I was just in the neighborhood, you know …”
I don’t get invited upstairs, but I do get her to agree to come for dinner on Friday. And that’s enough to improve my mood and send me humming with anticipation for the rest of the dreary week I have to spend in the field. In fact, I may not even feel so bad next time I see one of those Free Darryl King banners.
48
THE PROBATION DEPARTMENT QUICKLY began to put the word out about what really happened in the Darryl King hearing, and by the next day the tabloids had stories that threw the blame for his release back onto the judge. Several of them specifically explained that it was actually a tip from Darryl’s probation officer that led police to get a warrant and try to arrest Darryl. One source in the Probation union even went so far as to say that Darryl’s officer was still actively helping the police investigation to find him.
The story was then picked up by an assignment editor for one of the local news shows. At 6:19, the show’s anchorwoman delivered a rewritten version of the newspaper story. By now, a number of factual errors had crept in. The anchorwoman, who had light brown hair and bright blue eyes, stumbled once reading from the Teleprompter and then said Probation had taken over the Darryl King investigation.
“That’s quite a turnaround, Jane,” the show’s coanchor, a blond man, told the camera.
“It sure is,” Jane, the anchorwoman, said.
While the news was on, Joanna Coleman spoke with Darryl on the untapped phone line she had installed when she learned her regular phone was bugged.
“Check this shit out,” Joanna said.
“What?” Darryl asked.
From his end of the line, he could barely hear the anchorwoman saying, “King’s probation officer apparently has a personal stake in bringing the alleged gunman to justice …”
“They’re saying your probation officer is the one who give you up,” Joanna told him.
“I thought you said it was Eddie.”
“Maybe it was the both of them.”
The woman’s voice on the television kept going on and on.
“Oh … I don’t … Oh, I don’t believe this shit,” Joanna sputtered.
“What’s she saying now?” Darryl King asked as a baby began crying on his end of the line. “Shut the fuck up back there!”
“She says your probation officer got a warrant against you and he be looking for you right now.”
“Then he’s one dead motherfucker,” Darryl King said.
There was a very long pause. “Don’t be talking that stupid shit on this phone!” Joanna angrily told her brother. “Don’t you think like I told you no more? You’re not visualizing. You be acting like a Taurus again.”
“Whass up?” Darryl asked in a sluggish voice.
“I don’t want any more bugs in my house! It’s bad enough my other phone’s bugged.” She hung up abruptly.
Neither Darryl nor his sister was watching when a very agitated-looking police commissioner appeared on the eleven o’clock news insisting emphatically that his department was indeed still in charge of the Darryl King investigation.
49
I SPEND MOST OF Friday getting ready for my dinner with Andrea, consulting an old cookbook I haven’t opened since college to get the recipe for Chicken Fricassee with green peppers and tomatoes. I buy more than thirty dollars’ worth of groceries, including endive, wild rice, a bottle of expensive wine, and a chocolate mousse cake for the dessert. I’m a reasonably good cook, but I know my limitations.
I borrow pots and pans from the old lady down the hall and use the chipped night table first as a carving board and then as the dinner table. It takes me five minutes to hack up the chicken, forty-five minutes to season it, and then I give it an hour and a half in the oven. As the sun goes down, I realize I need candlelight to make it a truly romantic dinner. I run to the occult bookstore down the street and buy six black candles with satanic pentangles on the sides. While the chicken cooks, I scrape the symbols off with a razor.
I put out my best and only table settings, and then look around and see the rest of the place is a mess. There are stacks of probation files and beer cans everywhere that I stopped noticing months ago. Maybe my father isn’t the only one in the family who stockpiles things. I put the cans in a Hefty bag in the clo
set, stow the files in a kitchen cabinet, and finally throw out Barbara Russo’s earring. I hope I won’t be needing it anymore.
To my profound relief, Andrea appears to like the food. She compliments me on the dressing, which I didn’t make, and the garlic bread, which I did.
When she sits back with a contented smile, I figure it’s time to try to entertain her. “So did I tell you about the one we had in the field yesterday?”
“Which one’s that?” she asks dabbing her mouth daintily with a napkin.
“Sharon Young. Sheila Young. Something like that.” It’s funny that I don’t remember names as well in the field as I did in the office. “Anyway, she originally got picked up on a cocaine charge, and she didn’t make her hearing, so we go looking for her again. Right? So we find her out on the street about a block from her house. I don’t wanna think about what she’s doing out there. But when we come up to her, she’s like … vibrating.”
I do my best facial expression of somebody riding a cocaine buzz. Andrea nods like she understands.
“So we decide to bullshit her a little,” I say. “We tell her that we’re gonna take her downtown and have her urine tested right away. I know it’s a little more complicated than that, but we’re just trying to put a little pressure on her. So you know what she says?”
“No. What?”
“She says, ‘Oh, I don’t do cocaine anymore. But my boyfriend does. So before you test me, you all oughta know I give him head a lot of the time, so it may show up anyway.’”
Bill and Angel were in hysterics laughing when this incident happened, but Andrea’s only smiling thinly. Maybe I’m telling it wrong. I try another story.
“Did I tell you about the crack dealer we picked up in the wheelchair …”
She holds up her fork. “Steven,” she says coolly. “Do you think maybe you’re spending a little too much time with those macho jerks in the Field Service Unit?”
“They’re not jerks. They’re my friends.”
She goes back to eating her salad.
“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” I tell her. “You need guys like Bill and Angel with you. I mean, we were at this one place near Mount Sinai when people started throwing shit at us.”
“Was it a protest over that kid getting shot by the cop?” she asks.
“No, it was jealousy that we can walk around on two feet.”
That came out a little sharper than I intended it, and she looks at me inquisitively with those gray eyes.
“You know what it is,” I say, trying to explain myself. “It’s this whole Darryl King thing. I’m just sorry I didn’t duck when my supervisor gave me that assignment.”
“Why?” Andrea asks.
“Because everything’s gone wrong since then. I mean, first he comes into my office and goes nuts. Then he goes and violates on this car theft, which was what he did probably right after he killed that drug dealer in Harlem …”
Andrea puts her fork down. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Just out on the street… Anyway, you saw what happened when I tried to get him violated in court. And then he goes and shoots all these cops and then they shoot some poor schmuck kid and the city’s in an uproar. So that’s why I wish he hadn’t come into my office.”
“I see,” she says.
“Plus, now, I had this disciplinary meeting on Tuesday morning because of what the judge said and I almost got fired …”
“Was this Deputy Dawg who did this to you?”
I laugh because I never knew anybody else called Dawson that.
“He’s gross,” Andrea says. “You know he tried to ask me out at the beginning of the summer.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. But now he goes out with Cathy Brody.”
“Really? Is he into that S & M business too?”
“Yeah,” she says with a sweet smile, “they spend every weekend hitting each other over the head with free weights.”
I knew there was a good reason I liked this girl.
“Anyway,” I say. “This whole thing with Darryl has really got me kind of down. I mean, he shouldn’t have been on probation in the first place. I’m not gonna change him.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“With that funny look on your face.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about. “Well, I’m not going to change him,” I go on. “If anything he’s going to change me.”
“It sounds like he’s done that already,” she says, examining the remnants of the satanic pentangle on one of the candles.
All of a sudden I start feeling defensive. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I hope you’re not losing patience with all the rest of the people on probation. They’re not all like Darryl, you know.”
“I know. I know.”
She takes a couple of mouthfuls of dessert and looks up at me. “You don’t sound very convincing,” she says. “When was the last time you saw one of your old clients?”
There I have her. “I’m seeing some of them next week,” I say, reaching for a cigarette and then deciding I don’t need it. “They gave me a special report day or two so I can come into the office and catch up on some of the work I fell behind on in the field.”
“People at the office have been asking where you are,” she says.
“Really? Who?”
“Well, like Miriam who I work with.”
I picture heavyset Miriam, the secretary with the long fingernails and the Clark Gable mustache, giving me dirty looks in the legal department. “I thought she didn’t like me,” I say.
“Oh, she thinks you’re kind of a skeezy guy, but she likes to know what everyone’s up to. Especially after she saw all that stuff on television about Darryl King. She knew that was your client.”
Who doesn’t? I keep having these daydreams about bringing him in myself. But I guess that can never happen, so there’s no point in mentioning it to Andrea.
“So where’ve you been?” I say, turning the tables on her.
“Well, you knew I was away for a long kayaking weekend with my family, right?”
“Kayaking?”
“Yeah, you know, it’s like rowing,” she says with a paddling motion. “I used to really be into guys who had those big muscles on the bottom of their arms from using the paddle.”
I try not to let her see that I’m reaching around with my right hand and feeling the muscles on the bottom of my left arm. They’re puny. Why don’t the push-ups and weights build them up more?
“Maybe kayaking’s only something we do in Princeton,” Andrea says, drawing her knees up in front of her on the seat. “Do you do any sports?”
“I go to ball games sometimes.” It’d be nice if I could somehow rustle up some tickets to take her to a Mets game, I think.
“How about swimming?” she says. “Do you ever go swimming?”
I don’t answer right away, remembering the time my father threw me into the deep end of somebody’s swimming pool when I was very small. I can still smell the chlorine and feel the icy water closing over my head. I see the watery blur of my father’s image receding from me as I sink deeper. I shiver and try to wipe it out of my mind.
Meanwhile, Andrea’s asking if I’ve ever been skiing. Where does she get these goyisheh activities? I try to imagine myself huddling with her around two hot chocolate mugs at a cozy resort. But the picture won’t quite coalesce in my mind. I can see Andrea, the fireplace, the skis, and the preppy sweaters, but I can’t put my own face in the scene.
I sense a distance growing between us. I can’t afford the kind of life she’s talking about. I wonder if she thinks I’m just a shlub from Flushing and that’s the reason she’s pulling away from me.
“So why’ve you been acting cold lately when I run into you in the halls?”
Her face goes blank. “What do you mean?” she says.
I try to be more specific with my questions, the wa
y I would at work. “Why haven’t you been returning my phone calls? I called you three times last week …”
“I was busy,” she says vaguely, letting her eyes wander around the room.
I know I should ease off now and just let it drop, but I can’t help myself. “And why’d you walk right by me in the hall the other day?”
She drops her spoon and her jaw clenches. “Don’t talk to me that way, Steven,” she says stiffly. “You’re not going to find out anything by talking like I’m one of your criminals.”
That stops me for a moment and I sink down a little in my chair. I can hear the old couple downstairs having another fight and throwing things around. I hope we don’t sound like them already.
“You’ve got to learn to be more patient,” she says in a more conciliatory tone. “This isn’t one of your five-minute interviews at the office. I can’t give you those kinds of definitive answers. My life isn’t like that. Things change.”
“I know,” I say, trying to sound more casual. “But I still have to wonder what’s gonna happen with you and me.”
Her face loses its hard cast and she gives me a wistful smile. “I don’t know, Steven,” she says. “I wish I could tell you what was going to happen.”
I take that as a sign that my heart is about to get broken, so I try to beat her to the punch. “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I’m being an asshole. You wanna just forget the whole thing?”
“No,” she says.
“Well, what do you want to do then?”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She just keeps looking me in the eye from across the table. At first I think I must have a smudge of newspaper on my forehead or something.
“Hey, if you just want to call it a day, it’s no problem,” I say, trying to sound cool and breezy enough to take the pressure off her. “I can handle it.”
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