Freedomland Page 2

  She looked away again, exhaling in graduated shudders, trying.

  “I was lost,” she began, in that smoky, stunned vibrato. “He said, he said he could help me get through the park. The guy, he didn’t…” Her voice fluttered away. “He didn’t even—I got out of the car, OK? He didn’t even let me get a word out. He threw me down.” She looked off, clenching her teeth.

  “Were you raped?”

  She balled her impaled palms into white knots, blood dripping. Chatterjee quickly backed away to save his pants, then, leaning forward from a safe distance, forcibly pried her fingers open again. The security guard placed the doctor’s sandwich on a stack of X rays and left the room.

  “Listen to me. I speak six different languages. Just answer in human range. Were you raped?”

  The triage nurse, a woman in her fifties with frosted red hair and a giant button reading “#1 NANA” pinned under her collar, slipped in behind Chatterjee. She held an admissions form on a clipboard. The doctor waited for an answer as the young woman looked at both of them with a pleading muteness. His gaze compulsively returning to those eyes, he nudged her stool with his knee, moving it along on its casters to a sink. He worked on a pair of latex gloves, then took one of her palms and began to wash it gently.

  “Listen to me. I’m going to tell you something to calm you down, make you think about something else, OK? Then we’ll talk again.” He cleared his throat. “Besides Americans, do you know who’re the most dangerous people on earth?”

  He removed a shark fin of green glass with his fingers. The woman didn’t even flinch, her gaze roaming the walls.

  “The most dangerous people on earth are the educated middle-class men of the Third World. Do you know why?” He scowled in concentration, plucking a piece of rusted tin. The triage nurse, still behind him, rolled her eyes.

  “They labor under the illusion that their education will allow them to rise to the upper class of their homeland, OK? But the class system is too rigid. Are you following me?”

  The woman hid her eyes behind her free forearm.

  “So they come to America thinking anybody can rise to the top in America, but here they run into the skin game like running into a wall, so at best they get to be professionals, own a few tenements on the side. So what do they do, eh? You know what they do?” He teased out the tiny coil of metal, the woman’s knees running like jackhammers. “They go back to the country they came from and they start a peasant revolution to overthrow the upper classes in the name of the people. And in this way, they finally get to the top of the chain, the new elite. What do you think about that, huh?”

  “It’s not my fault,” the woman said distractedly.

  “What isn’t?” he asked, his tone registering true confusion. She wouldn’t say.

  “OK.” He shrugged, reaching for a soap solution. “So. That’s my story Tell me yours. What happened to you tonight?”

  The woman opened her mouth, but her throat caught and her juddering spine jerked her into a hunch.

  The doctor’s eyes strayed to a matted tangle of hair slightly to the side of her head. Still holding one of her injured hands, he reached out and fingered the crusted ridge of a scalp laceration.

  “Is this from tonight too?”

  “No,” she muttered.

  He glared at her for a long minute, as if challenging her reticence with his own. Finally, letting loose with an ostentatious sigh, he carefully laid her hand on the edge of the sink, said “Don’t move,” and walked out of the room.

  A dazed, disheveled black woman drifted in from the hall, one eye closed as if by a punch, her blouse buttoned all wrong. She had a dollar bill in one hand and a business card in the other.

  “You got change of a dollar?” she asked no one in particular. “They said I’m supposed to call this detective.” Before anyone could answer, she drifted back out into the corridor.

  “What’s your name, hon?” the triage nurse asked easily.

  Behind the nurse’s back, the Russian doctor interviewed a man on a gurney. “High blood pressure. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, well, I hear voices…”

  “What’s your name?” the nurse repeated.

  “Brenda Martin,” the woman answered distantly, watching another East Indian-looking doctor, a woman, extract a roach from a child’s ear with a pair of long dogleg scissors.

  “Brenda? Do you know your Social Security number?”

  Before she could answer, Chatterjee reappeared, a uniformed cop in his wake.

  “C’mon, Doc, I’m backed up the yin-yang here.”

  “Then radio for another unit.”

  Chatterjee gave the woman a sour look from across the room. “You talk to him,” he said, chucking a thumb at the cop over his shoulder.

  Brenda Martin shot to her feet and stood there as if about to make an announcement. Her sudden uprightness made the two men hesitate. She opened her mouth, and both of them, seemingly reading her eyes and coming to the same conclusion, made a tandem lunge. It was a heartbeat too late. Sliding through their grasping hands, Brenda Martin hit the floor hard.

  Part One

  One Monkey

  Don’t Stop

  No Show

  1

  “You know, life, life and death, you hear the kids; life and death are so, flippant to them. Death is no big thing. Death is, life.”

  Pacing back and forth across the stage decked with two pictures of Mother Barrett and her twin brother, Theo—enlarged photos framed in black construction paper with white doily trim—the Muslim cleric, a local black man in kufi and dashiki, was winding up his appeal, the people giving him a kind of slouched-down, half-guilty look of attentiveness. There were about a hundred tenants seated on folding chairs in the hangar-shaped community hall, but not many of them were under fifty or more than children. Six uniformed housing cops, flat-faced, arms folded across their chests, stood at the rear because of rumors about some kind of trouble.

  Detective Lorenzo Council, sporting black rumpled jeans and a positive-message T-shirt, sat on a window ledge to the side of the stage, waiting for his turn to speak. Everywhere Lorenzo looked there was something to piss him off. Out the window was that field of crated refrigerators Housing had neglected to secure with some kind of lock or seal. Lorenzo knew that tomorrow, or maybe even tonight, some of the kids would most likely try to find a way inside those death traps and make little clubhouses for themselves. Housing had laid the things flat on their backs, fearing that the kids would start tipping them over, but no one had had the additional brains to lay them door-side down. And what made it even more ominous was that every refrigerator had its destination chalk-scrawled on its side, like “12G 14 Hurley.” Like “This coffin’s for you.”

  Lorenzo also got hot on seeing the Convoy brothers out there, them and that bonehead Tariq Wilkins, hanging in the breezeway of One Building. Even though most of the guys their age were avoiding this meeting, avoiding that tap on the shoulder, the others at least had the decency to refrain from rolling outside tonight, a gesture of respect for the people who did show up. But these three…

  And this crowd in here, just what he would expect—mostly seniors like the murdered couple, showing up out of a lifetime reflex of heeding the call. But they were scared. You could see it in their lack of verbal response, in how they looked off or down, looked anywhere but at the memorial photos or the speaker.

  “The, the cowards, the coward, no…The thing; ’cause whoever did this ain’t even human, so I’ll call it a thing, a punkified thing.”

  The people nodded soberly, stone-faced, a tear here and there, a baby crying, a whiff of sweetish liquor. But it had been a whole year. Although this first-anniversary memorial rally had been Lorenzo’s idea, he was skeptical about anything tangible coming out of it. And this cleric was straight-up boring him to death.

  Nine-thirty He had arranged a split shift for tonight with his partner, Bump Rosen, who would field all jobs from four o’clock to nine-forty-
five. Lorenzo would return the favor from nine-forty-five to midnight so that Bump could race home in time to catch his twelve-year-old son’s acting debut on Law and Order.

  Nine-thirty Fifteen minutes to go, and he hadn’t even got up to speak yet.

  One of the purposes of this “rally” was to get the murders back in the news, to keep the crime warm if not hot, but only two reporters had shown up—the runner from the Dempsy Register and some intern with the Jersey Journal. Neither the police nor the press could throw much energy into two homicides committed in a county that had since tallied up 59 fresher ones.

  Lorenzo eyed the street reporter from the Register, Jesse Haus. He’d known her going on eight years, this small, overdenimed, overmascaraed, fine-boned young woman sitting on the aisle and scowling at her nails, reminding him, as she always did, of a race car stuck in traffic—crossed legs pumping, untended notepad bobbing in her lap, a nervous flicker in the eye, as if some of that mascara had gotten under the lid.

  A few months earlier, she had spent some time with Lorenzo, writing a profile of him for the Register that had landed him on the Rolonda Watts program. Now, absorbing her oddly vacant yet alert expression, Lorenzo found that her frenetic impatience was intensifying his own, making him feel more keenly that this whole show was slipping out of his control. Telepathically he beamed to her: Wait.

  Anxiously caressing his shaved head, Lorenzo studied the portraits of the elderly Barrett twins—both faces heart-shaped and genderless, each topped with a short iron-gray crop, the old lady’s eyes beady and disapproving, her brother’s equally narrow but impish. Uncle Theo, in his seventies, had still favored tight continental slacks and, even in the hottest months, turtleneck sweaters. He had retired as a bookkeeper at the Apollo but remained a fey smoothy who addressed everybody as “Baby”—everybody except the great entertainers he had been introduced to over the years. He referred to them as “Mister” Billy Eckstine, “Miss” Dinah Washington, “Mister” Sam Cooke, and “Miss” Sarah Vaughan. Uncle Theo was a “character” who had enticed decades of projects kids with ice cream and pizza, suckering them into digging Lionel Hampton jive his way through “Hey Ba Ba Re Bop,” Joe Liggins work out on “The Honeydripper,” Billy Ward and the Dominoes go on about a “Sixty Minute Man.” He always asked the boys if they knew what that meant, Sixty Minute Man, but that was as far as that kind of stuff ever went with Uncle Theo. Hundreds of Armstrong kids over the years, Lorenzo included, sitting on that plastic-sheathed couch, trying not to laugh at him. A character, Lorenzo thought, a singular individual who is no more—a loss honestly felt in him, one that justified this extra effort tonight.

  As far as Mother Barrett went, Lorenzo had never really liked her, although, given her brother’s flamboyant sexuality, her memory would be the smarter of the two to invoke at a rally like this. The hell of it was that Lorenzo, just like everybody else in the room, knew who had committed the murders, but no one, neither clergy nor cop, could speak the name in public, because the actor had never been charged.

  It was the grandson, Mookie, a die-hard crackhead—huge, explosive, semi-intelligent, not all there. Lorenzo was sure he’d done it, because Mookie had been homeless except for the times his grandmother and granduncle had taken him in, let him sleep on the floor, raid the refrigerator; and whoever had committed this monstrous act had afterwards laid neatly folded blankets under the victims’ heads, as if to make them comfortable—a gesture of remorse. The apartment hadn’t been trashed, just that one drawer left open in the bedroom, a scatter of food stamps and pocket change still in it: whoever had done this had known just where the money was hidden. But the Homicides had fucked up, had failed to get Mookie’s statement down on tape last year, so there was nothing to pin his contradictions against. After a few agitated sit-downs, the kid had simply refused to talk anymore, then had left the city for Brooklyn, where, unbelievably enough, he had “family” to take him. Without a murder weapon and without a witness, without someone’s stepping forth and saying, “Yeah, I saw him going in, I saw him coming out, I heard his voice raised in anger,” there was next to nothing Lorenzo or anyone else could do. And even though no one was talking—out of fear of payback, fear of involvement—all of Armstrong was raw and testy tonight, suffering through the first anniversary of one of its most shameful hours.

  “You know,” the cleric said, smiling and adjusting his hornrimmed glasses, “I could muster a hundred men with one phone call. Raise me a army, go out tonight, and it would be nothing for me to execute this, this creature right on the spot. Nothing.” The cleric grinned at the cops in the rear of the room, a few of whom grinned right back, softly bouncing their spines against the glaze-tiled wall.

  “But what we have here in this country, as, as flawed as it is, is a system, a judicial system…”

  Everything was rubbing Lorenzo wrong—like the arrest this morning of Supreme Griffin, the kingpin of the minute. The knockos had popped him coming off the George Washington Bridge, finding a baggie of chronic right up on the dashboard. Word had it that Supreme had simply stepped out of the car and, without prompting, casually told them about the half ki in the hubcap, the fifty bundles of heroin in the fake Benzi box. Running into him at the intake unit before coming to the rally tonight, Lorenzo had asked him why he had rolled over on himself like that. Supreme’s response, offered to a detective who liked to describe himself as “an old narco man,” made him sadder than hell:

  “I’m just so tired of it, you know what I’m saying? Just mother-fuckin’ tired.”

  These days people were fond of saying, “Crack’s whack, heroin’s back.” Yeah, well, Lorenzo was thinking, the stats might be down, the body count, but there was a tangible sadness out there, a resignation and surrender that was like death itself.

  “We are sometimes”—the cleric, speaking softly now, smiled forgivingly at the sullen folks below him—“sometimes a frightened people. And with good reason, good reason. A young black male growing up in this, this cesspool of a city has a greater chance of meeting a violent death before he reaches his majority than did the average GI overseas in World War II. And that is according to the New York Times, the New York Times. But I am here to tell you something, and that is that there is nothing and no one to fear in this world but God himself. For we shall all die, and then comes Judgment, then comes Judgment.” He bowed to his audience. “Asalaam alaikim.”

  As he moved off the stage, a thin murmur of “Asalaam alaikim”s came back at him, most people here a little too old to have tossed off Jesus in favor of Muhammad.

  On the sidelines, Lorenzo rubbed his face as the audience politely turned to him, dutifully awaiting their next pounding. He looked out the window, eyeing the Convoy brothers one more time for a hit of anger, took in that eerie geometric garden of refrigerators, then hauled himself to his feet.

  “We call ourselves a community We call ourselves a family,” Lorenzo declared in a cracked bellow, his usual tone of voice when addressing a large audience. “But we don’t want to be known as a snitch, so we are paying our allegiance to the wrong people.”

  He lumbered back and forth across the stage like a big cat in a cage, gazing heavy-lidded at the squirming tenants, the impassive housing cops. He was a big man—six foot three, 240 pounds—with a royal gut, a pendulous and chronically split lower lip, and thick glasses. In situations like this, loud and angry usually did the trick.

  “I have heard, I have heard someone say that if this was a white area, the police would have caught the guy already. If this was a white… No! No! That would only be true if the white people, the blue people, the polka-dot people would have stepped up and said, Yes! I saw who did it. Yes! I had heard those shots. Yes! Yes! Yes!… It’s time to get real with yourselves!”

  Lorenzo glared at them, his anger fueled by the fact that he knew he was castigating the wrong people, the ones who at least showed up.

  “But in this project it’s, No, no, no, don’t mention my name, no, no, don’t, do
n’t, no, no, what goes around comes around. So!” He reared up. “It has been a whole year. These people were shot a total of eight times. Eight explosions at nine o’clock in the morning.” He prowled the stage, spotting Miss Bankhead in the crowd, the elderly lady who had lived next door to the Barretts.

  “But nobody heard nothing, nobody heard nothing. Now how can that be, if I know that if I turn on my radio too loud on the fourth floor someone on the first floor’s gonna be complaining about the racket. How can that be, if I know that if I drop a, a juice glass on the second floor someone from the third floor is gonna be running to the housing office complaining about the party in my apartment.” Lorenzo paced, furious, pushing up his glasses. “We have lost two of our loved ones.”

  He pointed to Mother Barrett’s photo. “Look at her. Look! Mother Barrett. We gave her that name. She was our mother. Uncle Theo.” Lorenzo hesitated, knowing “Uncle” hadn’t the same visceral tug as “Mother.” “We called him that. How many of you here have gotten phone calls from him saying, Your kid’s at my house listenin’ to records. Is it OK I feed him dinner, feed her dinner, give him a book, buy her a, a ice cream cone.”

  There was some solemn nodding going on out there now, a pickup in the weeping.

  “They were old-school folks!”

  “That’s right,” someone said amidst a rising mutter.

  “Old school! The best people in the world! They were here back in the day! Back when everybody in this project looked out for each other!”

  People nodded more vigorously, peppering him with responses.

  “Tellit, Big Daddy!”

  He eyed old Miss Bankhead, suffering in her chair, rocking with her secrets. She’d been ducking him for a solid year now. There was a crackled report on one of the police radios in the back.

  “When I was a kid here growin’ up? If I messed up on one end of these houses, I got my butt kicked all the way home. My mother had her fifty pair a eyes back then!”