by Jan Brogan
This surprised me. Barry and I had gotten into a number of long discussions about how hard it was to start over in a new city at this age. He was always after me to volunteer for one of his veterans’ charities, saying it was a great way to meet people.
But now, he seemed unduly protective. I looked into my knapsack and zippered the inside pocket where I’d put the tickets. Barry rang up the milk and began to count out my change. He stopped midway. “Nothing for dinner tonight?”
The smell of rotisserie chicken hung in the air. The store had emptied. No one was behind me in line and the aisles were quiet. “Anything left in the deli section?”
“Some salads, I think.”
“You mind if I run back?” I asked.
Barry gestured for me to go ahead.
I turned down the aisle. The deli section was closed, but I grabbed a prepackaged salad from the cooler on the wall near the last aisle. As I tried to decide between two different-size containers of Mediterranean salad, I heard the front door scrape open. I listened for the sound of conversation, but heard none.
And then I heard the gunshot.
The blast reverberated through the small store. For a moment, I froze in the vibration and time stalled. A loud thud. Instinctively, I got low, kneeling behind the aisle-end Italian biscuit display. I clutched the plastic container of salad still in my hand, and held my breath, waiting for what would come next.
An eerie silence. No wail of pain, no threats. Fear pumped in all directions from my brain to my heart. I pulled my shoulder in, dropped my head lower, trying to disappear into the floor. I heard rummaging. The register drawer opened. A loud clatter as something fell over. But there were no voices. No swearing. No threats.
Say something, Barry, I silently begged.
My entire weight rested on one shaking knee. I struggled to remain still, staring at the plastic container of Mediterranean salad in my hand, wanting to put it down, afraid to make a single move.
More rummaging and a second round of clatter, as if things were being pulled from shelves. I clutched the plastic container, staring into its jumble of colors. Oil leaked from the bottom and onto my hand. A wave of it, slick across my palm.
I put the container on the floor, plastic crushed—my fear condensed into a crumpled corner. I could hear shuffling, a couple of footsteps, then silence.
Somehow I found the courage to peek around the display and saw the back of a khaki parka and crumpled hair beneath a panty-hose mask. I pulled back behind the display and hit something with my elbow. The Italian biscuits. A swirl of orange and green fell to the floor.
I held my breath.
The door slammed. There was complete silence.
Keeping low, I ran along the back deli counter, to the plate-glass storefront. Through the rain, I saw a white midsize car jerk out of its parking space and almost get hit by an oncoming car. There was a shriek of brakes, and the white car peeled down the street.
I ran up the aisle to the front counter. The register drawer was hanging open and the rack of porno magazines was toppled. Tiny drops of blood were splattered on the counter, on my quart of milk, and on the open grocery bag.
I looked down and saw Barry lying on the floor, head turned up, his eyes frozen in alarm, a gun not far from his hand. In the center of his forehead, a bullet hole oozed blood.
CHAPTER
3
I HEARD MYSELF scream for help, a deep, guttural cry. For a moment, I was stunned, shaken by the force of my own wail. I slapped my face, trying to click my brain into gear. I had to think clearly. Act.
I searched for a phone to call an ambulance, but there wasn’t one on the counter. I didn’t know shit about vital signs, but Barry didn’t look too good. I dropped to my knees beside him, felt one knee skid on his blood and knock the gun at his side. I tried to remember how to do CPR from what I’d seen on television. Was it beside the point? I straddled his body, refusing to look at his face, his eyes.
Could he not be dead? I wanted to believe there was a chance, so I clasped my hands together and began furiously pumping his chest. Over and over, pumping. Praying. Please, God, let me know what I’m doing. Make it a miracle. Make it work. “Come on, Barry, please. Live, for Christ’s sake. Help me out!” I shouted.
Gently, as if he could still feel it, I tilted his head back, working hard to avoid the open, alarmed eyes. My hand was covered in blood. I wiped it on the floor. Putting my finger to his lips and nose, I tried to feel air—even a slight movement. “Please, Barry!” I whispered. “Please!” How long could you go without breathing?
I sucked in the biggest breath I could with every intention of forcing it into his lungs. But as I lowered my mouth toward his, I stopped, unable to move closer.
Nothing flickered in Barry’s eyes, nothing beat from his chest. I exhaled, releasing the last, strained hope. No emergency procedure could change the bullet hole in his forehead. No medic, no matter how well trained, no matter how high tech the equipment, could bring this man back to life. I searched again for the cordless phone Barry kept on the counter. I found it lying underneath the toppled magazines and dialed 911.
I did not cry or stumble over the words.
After remaining numb through two hours of intense questioning at the police station, I sat at an extra computer terminal at the downtown newsroom of the Chronicle writing with an oddly detached professionalism. As if I were watching myself at the computer, reporting a crime I hadn’t witnessed. As if I weren’t hearing the bullet blast over and over in my head. As if I hadn’t felt my knee slide through his blood.
I sat at a U-shaped configuration of computer terminals that’s called the Rim. In the daytime, it was occupied by a gaggle of copy editors clarifying and correcting the grammar of the day’s events. But now, at nearly nine at night, the Chronicle was a lonely place with only half a dozen people scattered through the vast, open newsroom. I shivered in my jacket, separated by a dozen desks from a sole copy editor who wouldn’t look up from his screen.
Barry was dead. I’d known it when I’d heard the thud, when I was still hidden behind the Italian biscuit display. The beat cop, a young guy who already had a seen-it-all expression, went through the motions of checking for vital signs. Medics eventually arrived, but they did nothing but cover the body with a sheet.
Providence—A man at the Mazursky Market was shot to death in an apparent armed robbery shortly after 7 o’clock last night. Police are pursuing a man wearing a khaki parka and driving a white midsize car.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Dorothy Sacks, the city editor who was running the Desk, appeared beside me.
The Desk was another configuration of computer terminals, where half a dozen news editors made the final decisions on breaking news. At this hour on a Friday night, the Desk was empty except for Dorothy and another male editor whose name I didn’t know.
“I’m okay.” I looked across the vast expanse of bright-blue carpeting and flickering computers. Was I okay? Raised a Catholic, I hadn’t gone to church for years, except for Christmas. Still, I had the urge to pray. But when you can’t pray for someone to recover, what can you pray for?
“Sometimes it’s therapeutic to write about it,” Dorothy said. She was a tall, quiet woman in her late forties who was dressed in pleated jeans and what looked like an old, favorite sweater. Carolyn didn’t like her. There was something steely and humorless about her eyes, and her lower lip curled in, as if she was trying to figure something out. But her tone was genuine enough.
I shrugged. The young beat cop had sequestered me in the back of the cruiser, even before Barry’s body was carted away to the morgue. At the station, I was allowed to use the phone, and I called in the basic facts about the shooting to the newsroom. Dorothy had asked me to come downtown when I was finished with the police.
Now she leaned over my shoulder and read my copy from the screen.
Barry Mazursky, 57, was a father of three. He and his wife lived in Cranston, where he was active in several veterans�
�� and community-action organizations. A Vietnam veteran, Mazursky was licensed to own a handgun, which was found on the floor. Police said it appeared that Mazursky had attempted to pull a weapon in self-defense.
Dorothy was squinting at the text in a way that wasn’t good. Then she dragged a chair from an empty quadrant of desks and sat down beside me. Her head tilted thoughtfully as she reread the copy, deciding exactly what it was about it that she didn’t like.
“It’s not that this is bad…,” she began.
I was too numb, too frozen to reread my lead, to try to guess what was bothering her.
“It’s just that anybody could have written it.”
I was silent a minute, digesting her meaning.
“You can’t pretend to be objective on something like this. You’ve got to put yourself into the story. A first-person account that tells the readers what it was like to be inside that store. How you felt when you heard the gun.”
“I didn’t witness the actual murder.” I’d learned that from the police: From a strictly legal perspective, even if I could identify the guy in the parka, I could only place him in front of the dairy case ten minutes or more before the murder. No matter what my heart told me, I hadn’t actually seen him commit the murder. I’d only seen the back of a khaki parka and a panty-hose mask fleeing the scene.
“Didn’t you tell me you tried to give the guy CPR?” Dorothy asked.
The shiver began at the base of my neck.
Dorothy must have seen it. “Maybe it’s too much for you. You’re probably in some kind of shock. If you aren’t up to writing the kind of story I’m talking about, I understand.”
She was right. I wasn’t up to writing the kind of story she was talking about. I hadn’t wanted to think about what it was like to hear the gunshot, or what it had felt like to see the bullet hole in Barry’s forehead, to pound his chest and not be able to help him. And I hadn’t wanted to think about what might have happened to me if I hadn’t headed back to the deli counter.
The shiver again. My fingertips were frozen and my wrists ached. As I pulled my blue-jean jacket tighter around me, I knew. This wasn’t journalistic distance, but some form of physical shock. The protective wadding of my numbness would not last. No matter how I tried to block out the pictures, they were going to flash through my head. I’d see Barry, the toppled magazines, and the cold, hard expression of the man in the parka for days, maybe months. The tears would come, whether I got a story out of it or not.
Dorothy was waiting. She caught my eye, trying to transmit her patience, her understanding. She would accept my decision not to write this story and maybe even be grateful because she could go home earlier. But she’d think less of me for it. There was a certain journalism machismo I’d be lacking. A clarity in her mind’s eye about why I’d left big-city reporting for public relations and cocktail waitressing. Why I was now exiled to a bureau.
I thought of the opening on the investigative team and reminded myself that I was only a low-level witness to this crime, technically incapable of identifying the killer. I thought about all the reporters who went to truly dangerous places: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. “Is this for page one?” I asked.
“Only if you’re up to it.”
“I’m up to it,” I said, turning to the computer and forcing my fingers back to the keys.
From the deli, I could hear the door swing open, but I didn’t think much about it. My thoughts were on my stomach as I tried to choose a salad for dinner. Almost instantly, the sound of a gun blast blew away all those mundane considerations.
The hairline just underneath my temples throbbed with pain. I tried to rub the ache away and felt a trickle of sweat. Get it together, Hallie, I told myself, glancing at the clock. I had only forty-five minutes to write this story. I had to stay focused if I was going to make deadline.
I forced myself to reread my paragraph as an editor might. Almost instantly, what did that mean? I erased almost, began the next sentence, and halted. Who cared whether it was instantly or almost instantly; Barry was dead. An image flashed in my head: his eyes, frozen in alarm. The handgun on the floor. My fingers retracted from the keyboard, my hands balled into fists.
Another picture, this time: the big man in the khaki parka. The ugly look on his face when I’d apologized for scaring him. He would have killed me if I’d been at the cash register. He’d want to kill me even more if he read my byline, realized I’d been there. That I was the one who had called the police.
The shiver again. This time from lower in my spine. I wondered about the guy in the old navy jacket and gray cap, the hairy guy who’d never turned around. I wasn’t entirely sure the two had even been together. And the level of sound in the store made me think the guy in the khaki parka had been alone. Maybe I should leave out the part about calling the police, about telling them about the broken left taillight and dented fender. Maybe I shouldn’t write this goddamn story at all.
I told myself to calm down. I had a job to do. I couldn’t let my brain spin in this direction, couldn’t leave out details that would make this a better story. This was my chance. My chance to prove I still had the skills to be a real reporter. I was not going to let fear of some small-time crook stop me from writing a front-page story.
“I’m going to need that in about twenty-five minutes,” Dorothy said.
She was standing over me again. The lights had been shut off in the back of the room. The copy editor’s desk was now empty. Besides Dorothy and myself, only one news editor and one other reporter remained.
“Anything from police on an arrest?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
What had I thought? That all this would be wrapped up neatly for me? That with all the criminals in Providence, the police would be able to reach out and pluck this one from the streets?
Dorothy walked away and I returned to my keyboard, forcing myself to describe the difficulty of trying to make out the getaway car through the rain. The shock of finding Barry on the floor. I could feel my adrenaline surge as I wrote about my desperate attempts to revive him, and then the dead feeling in my heart, the futility as I waited helplessly for the police to arrive.
I was exhausted when I finally finished. I had time to reread it only once and check for spelling mistakes before I had to hit the button that sent the copy to the Desk. Afterward, I walked over to Dorothy to tell her it was done.
Her eyes scanned the copy. She made a few clicks on the keyboard and looked up. Carolyn was wrong about her: Beneath the professional steeliness was real kindness. “You want to wait around and go for a drink when I’m done? Talk about it?”
“Thanks,” I said, but it was already late. Walter would be showing up at my apartment in another hour or so—and he was probably the best person I could talk to at a time like this. “I’ll take a rain check.”
I turned and started away from her. But I suddenly thought of what would happen tomorrow after Walter went back to Boston. I’d drive myself crazy, hanging around my apartment, nothing to do but wait, hoping for an arrest. I turned back. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to come in tomorrow to make a few calls to police.”
Providence police. As a South County bureau reporter, I was way out of my beat. Dorothy hesitated, her lower lip bitten as she weighed this. “The weekend reporter can make the calls,” she said.
“Please.”
She looked at me levelly so that I could see it in her eyes: There were more than twenty murders a year in Providence. This one did not warrant special follow-up coverage. “I can’t authorize overtime.”
I turned to go.
Either she liked the story I’d just handed in, or she figured my suffering earned me the right to follow this particular news event, because she tapped my arm. “But you could take a comp day next week, if you’re sure you want to come in on a Saturday.…”
* * *
Memories kept rotating through my brain: the weight of Barry’s head as I’d tilted it back, the thick s
mell of oozing blood, the scream of the police sirens getting closer and closer. I sat on the couch with a half glass of white wine and every single light in the apartment on, waiting for Walter to get here.
I thought of Barry silently scolding me for giving my phone number to a strange man. The look of worry, reprimand in his eyes: How could I be so careless? A door opens and he’s dead. No more scolding, no more concern, no more electrical connections generating worry in his brain.
I closed my eyes and was back in the market, crouched behind the biscuit display. I saw the blur of dirty khaki as the man in the parka ran out the door. And then, as if he were running toward me down the aisle, I saw the man who swore at me in front of the dairy case, the sty in one eye and the glare of the other.
I started at the click of the lock. The door swung open. Walter stood at the doorway. He tossed his black felt cowboy hat on the bar, dropped his guitar case on the kitchen floor, and walked over. “Are you all right?” he asked. “What the fuck happened?”
I felt instantly soothed by the familiar roughness of his New York accent. He dropped to the couch beside me, and I told him everything—about the shooting, hiding in the back of the store, my failed attempt to save Barry.
Walter, who was originally from the South Bronx, used to be a cocaine dealer. Violence didn’t shock him. He listened to my story with almost professional detachment and let me talk without asking any questions. When I’d finished, he got up, walked behind the couch to the window, and pointed in the general direction of the Mazursky Market. “Right there?” he asked. “I thought this was practically a suburban neighborhood.” And then: “Christ, you’re lucky the guy didn’t see you.”
He returned to the couch, began to sit down, saw my empty wineglass on the table, and reversed direction, taking the glass to the sink. Walter, who in his recovery had become something of a zealot, didn’t even drink caffeinated coffee anymore, let alone do drugs. As my sponsor, he didn’t approve of my drinking alcohol, not even a single glass of wine, but he didn’t say anything about it. “Don’t try too hard to sleep,” he said, referring to the insomnia that had once led to my sleeping-pill problem. “I’ll stay up with you.”