Freedomland Read online

  She had heard about this shooting over an hour ago, but if she had shown up as soon as the call had come over, the cops would have been too cranked to talk, too shut down; the neighbors would either be in the dark or, if they knew anything, talking to the cops themselves; and she would have had to play human bumper pool with the handful of other reporters who had probably overheard the same radio squawk she had. Besides, there was no rush. It was long after the six o’clock deadline so, short of a mass suicide or an assassination, everything was for tomorrow night’s edition anyhow.

  Back at the rally in the Armstrong Houses, she had barely heard one word of what Lorenzo Council or that Muslim cleric had said, having just dropped in to kill time as she waited out the initial hubbub on this double shooting, like someone ducking into a shop to wait out a sudden shower.

  In fact, all she could recall of that exercise in civil futility was the cleric calling the killer “a thing, a punkified0 thing,” a tag that reminded Jesse of her roommate. She had just found out that the woman, a lawyer or a broker, had been charging her seventy-five percent of the total rent. Jesse was forking over nine hundred dollars a month for a don’t-tell-management bedroom created by bisecting the living room with an unpainted sheet of Masonite.

  Since she had moved in eight months ago, responding to an ad in her own newspaper, Jesse had always paid her portion of the rent to her roommate, the tenant of record, and had never actually seen the monthly invoice from the building. But earlier today, she had come on it by chance while making her midday breakfast in the kitchenette, the mingled aromas of Jean’s or Jane’s collection of International Blend instant coffees making her queasy as she stared at the tab: twelve hundred dollars, not eighteen hundred like she had always assumed. Seventy-five percent, and that slick bitch had the real bedroom too.

  But even at six hundred a month the place was a dump, a hastily built waterfront apartment house featuring starter pads for young professionals, the hallways reeking of canned air and the construction so tentative that her roommate’s never-used mountain bike, which hung suspended from ceiling hooks in what remained of the original living room, swayed every time the PATH train rumbled underneath the ground-floor health club. The interior walls of the building were so porous that, when Jesse had gone next door to complain about the Greatest Hits of the Eagles one day, she had discovered that, in fact, the music was emanating from the next apartment down the hall. Her own Masonite wall was, of course, no better: she awoke every morning to the sound of wet, smacky chewing from the kitchenette, her roommate a nine-to-fiver.

  The only aspect of her current living arrangement that she enjoyed was the view from her bedroom, the broad expanse of the Hudson River and, at the far shore, the West Side skyline of Manhattan, a vista she found both potent and serene, so much so that she had pushpinned a tourist poster of basically the same sight alongside her view of the real thing. That odd, redundant wall hanging was the only effort she had made in the last eight months to decorate, personalize, or somehow soften the ten- by fifteen-feet makeshift cell that she called, for now, home.

  Jesse had left the community center in a fog of agitation, but she was not so distracted that she didn’t register the look of mild dismay Lorenzo Council had thrown her way as she began crouch-walking up the aisle. And not so distracted that she didn’t hear the momentary fumble in his delivery as she headed out the door.

  He was a good guy, fighting the good fight, as her father would say, but vain and touchy about his reputation and popularity in the community.

  Thinking about Lorenzo as she finally began climbing the steep, narrow tenement stairs to the third-floor crime scene, she found herself once again wishing that she had never written that profile of him for the paper a few months ago. There still seemed to be some requirement for appreciation around him that made her feel more like a publicist than a reporter. The high, funky, crumble-textured hallways of the tenement had last been painted a glossy maroon and mustard, and the claustrophobic colors, combined with the dense waft of cauliflower and fried meat, made the hike to her floor an oppressive experience.

  A young cop stood spread-legged before the open apartment door. As she rose to the landing, Jesse could see behind him, triangularly framed by his ankles and legs, an overturned dinette chair and a large spatter of creamed corn on a rug.

  “Hey, how you doing?” She made herself sound exhausted.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t go in.” The cop sounded polite, bored.

  “But I was sent here,” she said vaguely, huffing now, going for the Oscar.

  “I’m sorry.” He crossed his arms like a genie.

  Then Jesse saw the other cop, inside the apartment.

  “Willy!” she called out, the uniform at the door now null and void.

  “Hey, Jess, what’s up?”

  Willy Hernandez came out smiling, having grown up with Jesse in Dempsy’s Powell Houses—her family had been one of the last white families, the Hernandez clan among the first of the Puerto Ricans.

  “What happened here?” Jesse asked, sounding personally dismayed.

  Hernandez shrugged. “Guy comes in, pop, pop, the old lady, the kid, then into the night.”

  “They’re gonna make it?”

  “I think so.” Hernandez shrugged again. “I hope so.”

  “Where’d they go, the OMC?”

  “Saint John the Divine.”

  “Who’s catching?”

  “Cippolino and Fox.”

  Jesse nodded, knowing Cippolino, knowing that whatever she couldn’t get here in the moment she’d get from the detective later on over the phone.

  “You know the actor?”

  “We’re looking.”

  “Who is he?”

  “So how’s your folks doing?” he said, stonewalling her. “They still in the projects?”

  The Hernandez family was long gone from Powell, the Haus family, her parents, still hanging in. Jesse was desperate to get them out, but her father saw their moving as an act of racist capitulation. Sometimes Jesse wished that someone would just come along and do them in, get it over with.

  “Comrade Haus!” Hernandez announced, saluting her father by his nickname. “Your pops was down.

  “Yup,” Jesse said quickly. “Can I come in?”

  “I can’t, Jess. You know that.”

  “Willy, I’m batting zero all day. C’mon, do it for the comrade.” She forced herself to smile, as if the memory of the few friends she had had in Powell—a clique of Dominican girls in junior high, a Jamaican boyfriend in high school, an odd mixed crowd of Filipinos and Guyanese for a few months after that, all lecture don racism by her white Commie father anytime they were foolish enough to come into the apartment—was a fond and rosy recollection. The dumb kids had felt bored, the bright ones bored and patronized. Her father never understood, or refused to accept, that most immigrants—white, black, brown—came over for the same reason they had always come over, not to embrace the struggle but to embrace the brochure, to have a good life. That meant, first and foremost, to get cash money paid. But you could never tell that to the last man on earth to call Russia “the workers’ paradise.”

  C’mon, Willy, I’m not going to touch anything.”

  Hernandez sucked his teeth, about to relent, when a photographer from another in-county paper, an overweight wheezer trudging up the stairs, joined them at the door. “Can I get some pictures, boss?”

  “No, no.” Hernandez waved him off, then looked at Jesse with regret. This guy had tipped the scales; no one was coming inside now.

  Loitering in the shadows of the third-floor hallway until she was sure the fat bastard had left the building, Jesse walked down one flight and hit the apartment directly below the crime scene.

  Responding to Jesse’s crisp raps, a fiftyish black woman wearing a quilted housecoat and a short coppery wig came to the door, the humid aroma of stewed meat escaping out into the hall from behind her. Taking one look at Jesse through eyeglasses the diamete
r of drink coasters, the woman said, “No, I don’t talk,” and attempted to close the door. Before she could retreat, Jesse blurted, “But they said I should talk to you,” and gestured to the floor above, to the cops.

  “No.” The woman shook her head, her hands entwined in a dish towel. “I don’t do that.”

  Jesse played through. “Did you know the child?”

  “No, I don’t know nothing.”

  “Your kids didn’t play with him?”

  “My kids?” The woman smiled, touched her fingers to her chest. “My kids is grown. That’s a child.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know.” She started to close the door again.

  “How do you have grown kids?” Jesse slid her foot a few inches over the threshold. “You look too young.”

  “No, they grown now.”

  “That lady up there was a friend?”

  “No, she was old.”

  “So the child was a grandchild?”

  “I don’t know. I keep to my own business.”

  “You see anything?”

  “No. I don’t do that.”

  “No?”

  “I just heard…”

  “What you hear?”

  The phone rang from inside the apartment.

  “Excuse me.” She attempted to close her door yet again, but Jesse’s foot was over the line. The woman gave her a long, pointed look, and Jesse had to withdraw.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” Jesse announced, pretty much knowing that the woman wouldn’t come back. She gave her two minutes before knocking again, then knocked louder, then finally tramped down the stairs. When she reached the front door of the tenement, Jesse spotted her brother outside, sitting in his car, sipping coffee, and rereading the paper. On seeing her, Ben quickly opened his door, ready to help, but Jesse waved him off.

  No one really seemed to care about this stuff these days, but as red-diaper kids growing up in Dempsy during the early sixties Jesse and Ben had been known as the Khrushchev kids, treated by most of their peers as two walking KICK ME signs adorned with hammers and sickles and, for those who wanted to see them, the faint outline of skullcaps hovering over their heads like halos, like cherries on top.

  Jesse, four years Ben’s senior, was his self-appointed protector for the first decade of his life, once half carrying, half dragging him in her arms five blocks to the hospital after some little patriot hurled a can of string beans at him, opening up his right eyebrow like a zippered purse. With adolescence, they had reversed roles, the newly six-foot-six Ben declaring himself his sister’s shield. This oath of fealty held right into adulthood, where Ben’s flexible and vaguely shady schedule allowed him to chauffeur his sister night or day, through the beat-down streets of her job. Jesse, reluctant to cut free from the bond of their wretched childhood, expressed that conflict by way of a graceless and surly demeanor toward him. Nonetheless, she always seemed to take him up on the escort service, whether it was needed or not.

  At Jesse’s feet now, a portly young black man sat on the bloody stoop gazing out at the quiet street and smoking a blunt.

  “You know what happened up there?” Jesse asked mildly.

  He leaned back, half turning to see her. “Nope.”

  “Two people were shot.”

  “Yeah, well, I knew that.”

  “You know them?”

  “Naw, well, yeah.” He offered her the fat joint but she waved it off.

  Her brother was only pretending to read, flicking glances at her through the windshield, pissing her off.

  “That ol’ lady and the child…” The man on the stoop shook his head. “Fuckin’ asshole.”

  “Who.”

  “The, you know.”

  “The shooter?”

  He responded to the question with a languid cluck of the tongue, the sound conveying both reproach and disgust. “I knew that was gonna happen.”

  “What’s his name?” Jesse took the joint, took a tiny hit, exhaled before it could work on her.

  “Damn. I come by, that old lady, she be out here, sit right here on this step, blood all over her ches’, just sittin’ here. I come over, she say, ‘Get the baby, the baby’s shot too, get the baby’ Then she like falls over, so I go upstairs.” He made that clucking noise again. “Baby’s all laying there on the floor, blood all over.”

  “Crying?”

  “Hell, yeah. So I go call, the amalance come, cops come.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The boyfriend, who you think?”

  “Of…”

  “The, you know, Chantal.”

  “Chantal…”

  “The mother.”

  “The baby’s mother?”

  “Man, she wasn’t even home, so he goes and…” He clucked and waved again.

  “Goes and shoots the grandma and the baby?”

  This time he made a noise like escaping steam.

  “What’s his name?” Jesse was writing all this down using her thigh as a desk, writing without looking. “What’s his name?”

  He hesitated, took a long toke, slowly twisted around again. “How you know it wasn’t me?”

  “Was it you?” Jesse wished it were. That would be fucking aces. She flicked a return glance at her brother. “Was it you?”

  He turned around to face the street again.

  “Tiger.”

  “It was Tiger?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Tiger what.”

  “Just Tiger.”

  “They know that?”

  “They lookin’ for him now.”

  “The cops?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  “Tiger, Chantal’s boyfriend?”

  “Was.”

  “Tiger the baby’s father?” Jesse was getting impatient.

  “Could be.”

  “Tiger the old lady’s son?”

  “Alls I know is Tiger.”

  “Where’s Chantal right now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She at work?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “How come Tiger did it?”

  “She kicked him to the curb.”

  “Chantal did?”

  “Yup.”

  “The cops know this?”

  “The ones talked to me does. But you could ask anybody on this street. Tiger’s a asshole. I just hope Miss Delano pull through. The baby too.”

  “Where’s Tiger live?”

  “Used to live upstairs. Damn, I can’t believe that shit. I jus’ come back from giving my father a driving lesson with the car, Miss Delano sittin’ out here, bleedin’, God knows how long she sittin’ there, rockin’.”

  “You just come back from giving your father a driving lesson?” Jesse was slowed down by that, touched, thinking maybe she liked people after all.

  Trudging back up the stairs, Jesse found the door of the crime scene closed. She had to ring the bell for close to a minute before the cop she didn’t know would open up.

  “Hey there.” She smiled, her fatigue now only half faked.

  “You can’t come in. I told you that.”

  “Who’s Tiger?” She asked like he owed it to her.

  “What?”

  “I hear Tiger did it.”

  “A tiger did it?” Fucking with her. “Hey, I’m just safeguarding the scene.”

  “You didn’t hear anybody talk about Tiger?”

  The cop just looked at her.

  Heading down the stairs again, Jesse ran into Cippolino, the catching detective. He had once held a damp paper towel to her forehead after she’d thrown back a few shots too many at a Saint Patrick’s Day open house. It was at some bar two, possibly three years earlier. Tommy Cippolino, as of this moment her oldest friend in the world.

  “Jose.” Jesse sat in the shotgun seat of the Chrysler, cell phone to her jaw, and glared at her own scrawl. Ben was halfway down the street, making a few business calls of his own.

  “Yo.”

  “I
got two shot.”

  “OK.”

  “Infant.”

  “OK…Where.”

  “In the chest.”

  “No, where.”

  “D-Town, 440 Firpo.”

  “OK.”

  “And I got a grandmother.”

  “OK.”

  “D-E-A. No, D-E-L-A-N-O. Esther.”

  “OK.”

  “Baby’s Damien, Foy. F-O-Y”

  “Damien?”

  “Yeah, like The Omen.”

  “OK. Age?”

  “I’ll get that. Shooter’s maybe the father.”

  “There you go.”

  “But it looks like they’re gonna both pull through.”

  “Huh. OK.”

  “The grandmother comes out, shot.”

  “OK.”

  “Just sat on the stoop, like in shock, I guess.”

  “OK.”

  “Neighbor comes by…”

  “OK.”

  “Aaron P-A-R-M-A-L-E-E.”

  “OK.” Jose’s responses were soothing and rhythmic as he simultaneously took down her words and edited them on the fly, the two of them getting into a familiar call-and-response rhythm that they had cultivated over the years.

  “Parmalee comes by. Lady says, quote, ‘The baby’s upstairs, get the baby,’ end quote.” Jesse thinking, More or less.

  “OK.”

  “Goes upstairs, sees the baby on the floor, bleeding.”

  “OK.”

  “Parmalee calls the amalance,” Jesse said, putting the guy’s spin on it.

  “OK.”

  “Aaron says to me, quote, ‘I knew that was gonna happen,’ end quote.”

  “Good.”

  “Says the actor’s a guy named Tiger.”

  “Last name?”

  “Yeah, right. Parmalee says Tiger done got kicked to the curb by the baby’s mother, Chantal. I don’t have a last name yet.”

  “OK.”

  “Police say, ‘Tiger? Who’s Tiger?’”

  “OK.”

  “But she kicked him out.”