Slow Motion Riot (12 page)

"Who is that?" Darryl
King's mother asked.

"Just some kid," Darryl
grumbled. "Keeps following me."

They were in a
Harlem
boutique/electronics store called Big Anthony's. Eddie Johnson stood by the
front counter, staring up at the surveillance camera. The security guard by the
door paid no attention to him or the constant buzzing from the store's alarm
system for shoplifters. The muscular brown pit bull by his side strained at his
leash and growled indiscriminately. Dozens of young men walked in and out of
the store with ropes of gold chains and designer canvas jackets, which they
wore off-the-shoulder style like 1940s movie starlets wearing mink stoles. A
sleek soul ballad by Whitney Houston played over the public address system.

Darryl's mother looked down at the
jewelry case and slapped her son on the arm. "When're you gonna buy me
this necklace?" she said, pointing to a long, twisting chain of stones the
color of rubies and sapphires.

"After you pay for my
coat," he said.

"You're making money now
too," she said.

He gave his mother an uneasy look.
At thirty-five, she was a rail-thin, hollow-cheeked, and snaggletoothed woman
who had an even longer criminal record than her son. She had a pending
indictment for criminal sale of a controlled substance in the seventh degree to
go with her conviction for stabbing Darryl's fifteen-year-old friend Mark.
She'd started shooting heroin when she was thirteen, and now many of the veins
in her arms, legs, and neck were dead and discolored from her needlework. Her
career as a prostitute began a couple of years later, shortly after the birth
of her children. These days she was often quiet and preoccupied, though she
could turn vicious without warning. She lived for drugs, money, and her
children, in that order.

"Hey, Moms," Darryl said.
"Look at this."

She turned and saw Eddie Johnson
making scary faces for the surveillance camera. When he saw Darryl and his
mother glaring at him, he tucked his head down inside his unseasonably heavy
blue parka and began to convulse. They couldn't tell if he was laughing or
crying uncontrollably.

"Something very strange about
that boy," Darryl's mother said.

"He just do everything he see
me do," Darryl explained. "He got arrested last year in the
Bronx
,
'cos he was throwing rocks at cars. And he just do it 'cos he see another kid
do it. He don't think for himself."

His mother hugged herself and
rolled her eyes. "Why you let him hang around?"

Darryl told her that Eddie Johnson
had actually been moderately effective as a steerer and a lookout when they'd
recently taken over two of Pops Osborn's corners. Since that night he'd seen
Pops at the Apollo, Darryl had been paying more attention to the family
business. They'd made more than eight thousand dollars the next week and they
were just getting started. Now he was starting to see the importance of little
things. Like saving money and making long-term plans. Like the fact that
tomorrow night, Eddie would be in the apartment next to Pops Osborn. He would
give Darryl and the others the signal when Pops was alone and vulnerable. Then
they could kill Pops and take over the rest of his locations, including the Fortress.

"Sounds all right,"
Darryl's mother said in a spaced-out voice.

There was a commotion at the back
of the store. Darryl's custom-made jacket was ready. It was made from smooth
white leather. An eight-point star adorned the back and there was a large Louis
Vuitton symbol on the front. The price was three thousand five hundred dollars.
Big Anthony, the store's proprietor, stood behind Darryl and draped the jacket
over his shoulders as though it were an opera cape.

"I look nice," Darryl
said, studying his reflection in the store's full-length mirror.

"Yes, you do," said his
mother. "Very handsome."

Eddie Johnson came over and began
to meekly pet the jacket. Darryl made a fist like he was about to sock him.

"Darryl, don't," his
mother said. "He just wants to feel it."

"Next, he's gonna wanna wear
it home," Darryl complained.

"So what would be the harma
that?" his mother said. "Didn't I always teach you all to share shit?"

The Friday before the long weekend
goes slowly. I feel blocked and useless behind my desk, and I wish for the
millionth time I had a window in my cubicle so I could at least see if there's a
sunny day going on outside. I have to settle for the photograph of the beach
landscape on my wall.

This is one of those days when I
long to be there. It seems like all my clients are trying my patience. Darryl
King doesn't show up for his scheduled appointment, and to add to my
frustration, Andrea gives me the cold shoulder in the hall when I come by her
building to turn in some papers. And then there's Scottie Austin, a short and
jittery twenty-four-year-old mugger, who normally hangs around Port Authority
but has just been arrested for robbing an old man in his
Washington
Heights
building for twenty-five dollars.

Scottie has gotten all the breaks
he's going to get. "You're definitely getting violated this time," I
tell him.

"But I didn't do it," he
protests. He appears to be pulsating in his chair. A long dark scar marks the
back of his hand and an even uglier one runs across his cheek.

"Oh yeah? What happened."

"Okay. I'm gonna tell you what
happened. Okay? This is what happened. Here it comes: The old man just dropped
his money on the ground." Scottie sits back and folds his arms, like he's
just finished a formal presentation.

I raise my eyebrows. "And
then?"

"Yeah," Scottie says.
"He dropped the money twice. The first time I'm like, 'Yo, whass up with
this shit? You drop your money.' And I give it to him. And he say, 'No, I don't
want it,' and then he throw it down again. So then I pick it up."

"I find that very hard to
believe," I say, grimacing and examining the arrest report more carefully.
"Especially since it says here the old man caught a pretty bad beating
from you. You broke his nose and two of his ribs when you threw him on the
ground. I think I'm gonna have to violate you."

"Oh no. Don't do that. I can't
go to jail. I'm not a career criminal. I'm a good guy."

I flip back and forth through the
two dozen pages in Scottie's file.

"I'm just a jolly-going
fellow," says Scottie, sitting back in the chair and musing on his place
in the universe.

"You're a menace," I say,
closing the file. "If it's not this arrest, it's just gonna be something
else. The scams you were pulling at Port Authority were bad enough, but then I
look at your rap sheet and all I see is you getting arrested for more and more
serious crimes all the time. And the reason is that you're still smoking crack."

"I only smoke crack at
night," says Scottie proudly. "And maybe in the afternoons. But only
sometimes in the morning."

"Why not then?"

"I gotta sleep."

Maybe I'm getting a less tolerant
attitude from hanging out with cops at the target range, but there seem to be
more and more clients who get on my nerves the way Scottie and Darryl King do.
It's all these serious felons with serious crack habits. I guess, for one
thing, it's harder to empathize with them than with the other clients. What I
really wonder is why anyone would want to smoke that shit. Don't they have
enough problems? I know I do.

I mean I did a little bit of
experimenting with sex and drugs when I was in school, and I certainly still
remember what it felt like the first time Jack Daniel's took off the top of my
head and let the pressure out. The only problem is, you can never quite get
that first high back again. You have to try something harder each time. And
eventually you stop feeling anything at all.

I'm just thinking about having a
drink when Richard Silver walks in for his second appointment. He's a little
more casually dressed this time, wearing brown loafers with gold buckles, a new
pair of chinos, and a white linen jacket. With his hands clamped in his
pockets, like he's carrying the most valuable lint in town.

"Hi," I say.

"Hi yourself," he
grumbles.

The last thing I need is a big
fight with this guy to start off the long weekend, so I just get out the file.
But flipping through my notes, I see I left a lot of items blank during our
last appointment because he had me distracted.

He sits back, legs crossed and
hands laced up behind his head. His eyes never leave me. If you were just
taking a glance, you might think he's waiting patiently. But I know that he's
just coiling himself up, like a cobra waiting to strike.

"We got a lot of things to
cover today," I say in the voice I use when I don't want a client to
trifle with me. "We never really talked about your current job or your
community service requirement."

"Is that so." There's
absolutely no change in Silver's expression.

"We never even talked about
what you got convicted of," I go on, needling him a little. "And I
always ask people about that."

Silver stirs an inch or two and
clears his throat. "My conviction?" he says darkly.

"Yeah," I say. "Your
crime. Why'd you break the law?"

Silver smiles thinly at the
insolence. "Why did I break the law?"

He gives me a sad, magisterial look
that seems to say, oh, but only a couple of years ago I could have broken you
in half and stuffed you in a garbage can. "Why did an untalented
prosecutor have to get his name written in the newspaper with my blood?"

"That's not really the point,
is it?"

"The hell it isn't. My one mistake
is that I failed to properly delegate responsibility."

"In other words," I say,
"you didn't hire somebody else to get caught holding the bag. I mean what
kind of sleazy shit was this? Paying off somebody from the Board of Estimate
with a million dollars in a bowling alley and hookers in a hotel room? That's
just sad, that's all."

Silver's reaction is hard to gauge.
His eyes bug out a little and he rises about a half inch in his seat. It looks
like he's smothering an explosion inside himself. "Let me tell you
..."

There's a knock at the door. Two
Puerto Rican boys stick their heads in.

"Yo, man, we waiting all
day," says the taller one, who wears a green hooded sweatshirt with
nothing underneath.

The younger, smaller one wears a
clean white shirt. He's not old enough to shave, but he's grown as much hair as
he can on his upper lip. "We wait since lunch," the young one says.
"Now we miss lunch. You should buy us lunch."

"I'm sorry," I say.
"Who are you?"

"You don't know?" says
the tall one in the sweatshirt, bouncing up and down with nervous energy.
"Oh, man..."

"Gimme a break. I got two
hundred and fifty other clients. I can't know everybody on sight."

"Morales, man." The tall
one puts his hand to the side of his mouth like he's about to whisper something
to me. "Unauthorized use of motor vehicle."

I know the name and I vaguely
recall seeing the tall one before. Silver stares up at the ceiling, holding on
to a thought.

The two Puerto Rican boys keep
bumping shoulders with each other.

I look for my master list in a desk
drawer. "Both of you aren't my clients, are you?"

"No, just me," says the
tall one in the sweatshirt. "This be my baby brother, but I take him
everywhere I go so he don't get in trouble at home."

I hold up a finger. "Can you
just wait outside a couple of more minutes please?" I ask.

"We not the only ones waiting,
you know," the taller, older Morales says.

The two boys leave, slightly
annoyed with me. I write down the name Morales on a pink message slip and then
turn back to Silver. "You were saying?"

"You know there's a thing the
old-time pols used to call 'greasing the public weal.'" From the way he
pronounces the words, the pun is clear. "Are you familiar with that
expression?"

"Not entirely."

"Either you are or you
aren't." The birthmark on his eyebrow makes him look more skeptical than usual.

"Okay, I'm not."

"All right," he says,
standing up and looking at my posters. "You got Bob Dylan on your wall.
Here's a little history lesson. This is what it was really like. The sixties.
I'm in the City Council. You're in Romper Room. Or something. Wetting your
pants. Whatever. City's about to blow up. We got war protesters up at
Columbia
.
Martin Luther King getting popped. They're going apeshit in
Newark
and
Los Angeles
. In the ghettos
here too. We're talking Mau Mau rebellion. They're gonna burn
New
York
down. What do we do?"

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to
answer, so I light a cigarette without saying anything.

"Frankly, we paid some of
those ghetto guys off," Silver says, pointing and looking down at me like
a college professor addressing a student. "A guy called Muhammed. Another
one named Hakim. Threw everything at them. Money. Jobs. Grants. Know what? No
riots in
New York
. You know what
else? People who wouldn't have had a shot were able to get civil service jobs
and move to better places. Completely legal? Maybe not in every single case."
He smacks his right hand into the palm of his left. "Necessary for our
survival? I think so." He doesn't mention Sullivan Houses, the low-income
project he stopped supporting a short time later.

"By the way," I say,
leaning forward in my chair. "How did you do with those voters you paid
off?"

"Very well," Silver says,
pacing back and forth and glaring at me combatively. "Call it
gratitude."

"That's gotta be the highest-minded
excuse for bribery I've ever heard," I say. "Correct me if I'm wrong,
but you and your buddy went downtown to Bowlmor Lanes with a shopping bag full
of money because you had a client who wanted to tear down some nice landmarked
buildings on the
Upper West Side
and put up a condo..."

"The thing with Jimmy Rose was
a serious thing," Silver says loudly, interrupting me. "There is a
lack of affordable housing in this city. My client wanted to build fifteen
hundred new units. Go ahead. Smirk. I would make money. True. But it would be
for the common good."

He puts his hands together like a
man begging for absolution. "Of course, the bureaucracy and the approval
process move so slowly that it's hard to get investors to hang in there. So
Jimmy and me. We did it. We greased the public weal. Guilty as charged."

Throughout the monologue Silver has
been on his feet dramatizing, laughing, bullying. But when he gets to the part
of the story where he gets convicted and his friend Rose kills himself, he
seems drained. "You know the rest," he tells me. "Crime and
punishment.. .Am I gonna do it again? No. My friend is dead. My life is nearly
ruined. Did I have to do it in the first place?"

He takes off his jacket and slings
it across his shoulder in the "man of the people" pose he must've
copped from an old Frank Sinatra album cover. "We're all whores, you look
at it that way. You wanna make a difference? You accept what they call
'corruption' in school. Only they don't tell you that." He raises his
voice and then drops it suddenly. "Steven, you can't say anything to those
Puerto Rican boys just in here that's gonna change their lives. To change
lives, you need resources. You want resources, you buy into the system. You buy
into the system, watch out for the prosecutor, my friend.

"See, you may not be doing
anything wrong now, Steven, but you're not doing that much right either."
With that, he puts the jacket under his arm, bows his head, and walks out the
door.