Slow Motion Riot (14 page)

"What're you looking
for?" Bobby "House" Kirk asked.

"Car keys," said Darryl
King.

"For what?"

"Oldsmobile Cutlass
Supreme."

Darryl King rolled Pops Osborn's
body over and checked the left hip pocket. Blood was spreading from the gunshot
wound in the back of Pops's head and staining the white carpet. Eddie Johnson
stood in the corner, quivering, with his head tucked into his parka. A bottle
rocket went whistling off a rooftop somewhere outside. Darryl told Aaron
Williams to stop counting the cash for a minute and look in Sunshine's pockets
for the keys. As Aaron went through the dead West Indian's clothes, Darryl
began to sniff.

"Yo, man, I smell
something," he said.

A thick pile of twenty-dollar bills
and a money-counting machine sat on the table by the window, surrounded by
containers of Chinese food that Pops had ordered. There was half an egg roll
left on a paper plate nearby. Bobby Kirk picked it up and put it in his mouth.

Darryl looked over at the fat key
chain Aaron was jangling. "One of these gotta be for Pops's Cutlass,"
Aaron said.

Darryl snatched the keys. Bobby
asked him why he wanted them so badly. "That's my ride," Darryl said,
stuffing the keys along with two vials into his pants pocket. He figured that
if his sister and her Jamaican boyfriend, Winston, were going to take over
Pops's business, then he was at least entitled to the car.

"You remember the license
number?" Darryl King asked Bobby.

"No, why should I?"

"Then we're just gonna have to
try every Cutlass parked downstairs."

Bobby threw up his hands angrily
and let them fall gently to his side. "Yo, I ain't with that, man,"
he said.

"Fuck you, Bobby," Darryl
said. "Let's go."

Aaron said he would stay behind
with Eddie Johnson for another minute or two to wipe the place down for any
fingerprints and grab any extra guns they could find. They did not have to
worry about witnesses. The neighbors already agreed they did not hear the nine
rounds of gunfire.

Darryl headed for the door.
"My head is going like this," he said, making a pulsing motion with
his hand.

"You smoke too much of that
shit," Bobby said, following him.

"Don't go judging me, Bobby.
That's fucked up."

On Tuesday morning, I'm coming up
the hall to my cubicle when I notice my door is already open. Immediately I
start thinking somebody must've broken in and gone through my papers. There's
been constant tension between management and the union these past few weeks,
and all kinds of weird things have been happening. As I get closer, I hear
papers rustling and a chair squeaking inside my cubicle, so I know whoever it
is still is in there.

I pause outside the doorway and
wonder if I should go get help in case things get rough. But decide it's my
office after all, so I come belting in, shouting, "What the hell is going
on in here?"

Andrea Clinton almost falls off my
chair. Her papers go sliding off her lap and flying on the floor. "You
frightened the shit out of me," she says.

"Sorry," I say, bending
over to pick the papers up. "No one's supposed to have a key for this
office except me."

"Your supervisor let me
in," she says. "I told her I had a surprise for you."

I know she can't mean this the way
it sounds, and I look at her carefully.

She's dressed a little more
casually today, in a blue oxford shirt and a khaki skirt without stockings. Her
ponytail is tighter than before, giving her a severe, judgmental look. Like
she's so beautiful that she doesn't have to forgive the people who cross her.
The rest of us can't afford a lot of grudges, because life's too short. You
have too few friends. But a truly gorgeous girl can write off anybody, because
somebody else will always be interested. I better watch what I say here.

My stomach's jangling as she hands
me the file without looking at me. The top sheet is a new "hit
notice" generated by the New York State Identification System computer in
Albany
.
It says:

King, Darryl. Male. Black. NYSID
#04606670N. Eighteen years old. Originally sentenced to probation on June 2.
The above individual using the name Daniel Kane was re-arrested on July 4 for a
crime committed earlier that evening. The charges were attempted grand auto
theft, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, burglary third-degree, possession
of burglary tools, and resisting arrest.

"Shit, man," I say,
checking out the rest of the file.

"I thought you'd be
pleased," she says coldly.

"Why should I be?"

"It proves you were right
about him all along."

True enough, but in another way I'm
kind of disappointed. There's no denying that Darryl's a bad guy, but I was
looking forward to trying to turn him around. It would've been a challenge,
kind of like a hunter getting a prized lion's head to go over his mantelpiece.
But now that will never happen. Maybe just as well though, I think, looking at
his file.

"He was trying to steal an
Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme," I say, checking the arrest report. "I
guess the arresting officers charged him with everything they could think of.
Where is he now? Are they still holding him?"

"Look at the next page,"
Andrea says in a curt voice.

The next page says Darryl was
arrested two nights ago by officers from the 25th Precinct, and then arraigned
in Manhattan Criminal Court before he was released on his own recognizance.

From this point on, it should be
cut-and-dried. Darryl was arrested and now it's my job to go to the judge and
tell him that he's a violator who should go to jail. But I notice Andrea
looking upset. I hope she's not going to hit me with that
white-man's-justice-black-man's-grief argument again. I feel myself tensing up
inside at the thought of fighting with her.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"What's the matter?" she
says. "What's the matter is that they gave this guy probation in the first
place."

I take off my windbreaker and
squint at her like I can't believe I'm hearing her right.

"How could anybody let this
guy go?" she says. "Didn't they look at who he was? Didn't they see
what he'd done?"

I can tell she's about to launch
into a full-fledged rant, so I cut her off right away. "Wait a
second," I say. "The other day, you were giving me a hard time about
the way I was talking about my clients."

"Well, that was before I saw
the rest of this case."

Andrea has come up with the files
for both Darryl and his mother, Kimberly, including her conviction for stabbing
Darryl's fifteen-year-old friend Mark. "I heard about this," I say,
turning the page.

She's also managed to get hold of
Darryl's previously sealed juvenile record, which says Darryl has been arrested
at least four times a year since the age of twelve for muggings, beatings,
joyrides, sexual abuse, chain snatchings, and drugs. The earliest recorded
incident happened when he was six, just after he was placed in a foster home.
He was on his way to his first grade class one day when he found a hypodermic
needle on the sidewalk outside the school. He took the needle into the
classroom and began stabbing his little classmates. He was sent home for a week
and then taken to a counselor.

"It's like he's one of those
guys with the extra Y chromosome," Andrea says furiously. "He just
loves to do crime..."

I know just what she's feeling
right now. I remember the first time one of my clients left my office and went
right out and did another crime. It felt like a bucket of cold water in my
face. But as I'm reading Darryl's file, I sort of get a sad feeling too.

"Look at the kid's
mother," I say. "They had to take him away from her when he was six
and put him in a foster home."

"Yeah, but look at the report;
she got him back when he was twelve."

"That's still a long
time," I tell her. "A lot of bad things happen to kids in those
foster homes ... and where's his father? He never really stood a chance."
Just the old social worker in me talking again.

I guess I feel sorry for Darryl in
an abstract way. When I think about the guy who was actually standing here,
bellowing out his insane fantasy, I get frightened and angry.

Andrea has also uncovered the
obscure detail that Darryl King was once nicknamed "Dooky."

"I gotta remember that,"
I say. "I always like to know people's nicknames."

Andrea frowns as I look at the
arrest report for the recent case, which involves Darryl's attempt to break
into the Olds-mobile Cutlass Supreme parked near
East
124th Street
. The name of the arresting officer,
Ron Kelly from the 25th Precinct, is typed at the top. "Let me give this
cop a call," I say. "If you can get the arresting officer, he can
give you some nice details to put in your violation report."

She hands me a cup of coffee as I
dial and listen to the phone ring at the precinct. You almost never get these
cops the first, second, or the third time you try because they all have these
weird schedules. I leave one message for Kelly, and then a half hour later,
Andrea and I go down to the legal department and try him again. This time we
get lucky and the sergeant catches Kelly going out the door for the day.

There's a sound like the receiver
being beaten with a hammer and then he picks it up. "This is P. O.
Kelly," he says with a raw
Queens
accent.
"What can I do for you?"

I look over at Andrea, who's
listening in on an extension a few feet away, and quickly explain who I am. I
ask Kelly if he can spare a minute to tell me about Darryl's arrest.

"Ah, I don't know about any of
this," Kelly says. "Didn't you get what you needed from the D.A.'s
file?"

"Sometimes an arresting
officer can pass on the kind of detail that will convince a judge to lock a guy
up."

There's a long pause. Background
noise roars on his end of the line. "You know," Kelly says finally,
"the relationship between your department and our department is not the
most cooperative in nature, if you hear what I'm saying."

I give the phone the finger and
mouth "Fuck you" several times while Andrea looks on, appalled at
what he's telling me. Some cops hate probation officers beyond reason. They're
sure that we're protecting criminals and that we love putting them back on the
street after they arrest them.

There's also an element of class
snobbery. A cop's starting salary is about ten thousand dollars higher than a
probation officer's; the gap in pay and benefits increases with each year on
the job. So a lot of cops don't like to consort with lowly social workers.

"Maybe you should have your
superiors reach out for my superiors," Kelly says. "Let them sort it
out."

"Oh, c'mon, man..."

"Hey, that's the way it is ...
yeah, just a minute, I'll be off," he yells to somebody else at the
precinct. "Anything else I can do for you, Mr. Baum?" Kelly's voice
grows fainter as he prepares to put the phone back on the hook. Andrea shakes a
fist in frustration at the phone.

Figuring I got nothing to lose, I
try one more angle. "That's Byrne," I say.

"Your name's Byrne? Not
Baum?"

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you say so?"
Kelly says in an I-didn't-know-you-were-an-Irish-guy tone. "Hold on just
one second, I got that mutt's file right here."

Andrea's mouth drops open and she
has to cover her receiver as she begins laughing hard. When she regains her
composure, she gives me a thumbs-up sign.

Kelly reads the notes about the
arrest. Just after
midnight
on Sunday,
they arrested Darryl King and another young man named Robert Kirk trying to
break into an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked near a big housing project by
the
East River
. I smile and put my hand over the receiver.

"Bobby 'the House' Kirk was
his codefendant on the gas station robbery," I tell Andrea in a soft
voice. "He violated another condition of his probation by hanging around
with a 'disreputable person' like Bobby. We can use that in the hearing.''

I scribble notes as Kelly goes on
to say that Darryl was carrying a sharpened screwdriver. He took a swing at
Kelly when he was arrested and used "abusive and threatening
language," though Kelly won't or can't give me the exact words.

The hearing for the arrest is a
month and a half away, so Kelly's worried that my violation proceeding will
ruin his collar. I assure him it will be okay.

"So how'd you pick him
up?" I ask now that we're on slightly more friendly terms. "Were you
just going by the building on patrol?"

"Oh no, we were already up
there as backup to the homicide detectives. We just saw this guy King and his
buddy getting behind the wheel of the car when we came out."

"Oh yeah?" The air around
me suddenly seems to get very still. "So what was the homicide up
there?"

"Ah some fuckin' thing,"
Kelly says. "They killed two of the fuckin' crack dealers who were running
the fuckin' building."

I flash on the thing that Lloyd
Bell was telling me the other night at Junior's: that Darryl's friend was
trying to firebomb some crack dealer in
Harlem
. Because
of the hazy way Lloyd told me the story, I'd just let the whole thing hang out
in the back of my mind.

"Who'd they arrest for the
murders?" I ask, letting him hear the urgency in my voice.

"They didn't catch anybody
yet. They found a pile of clothes in the apartment with the bodies and a
forty-four with the prints wiped off near the incinerator down the hall."
He lowers his voice. "It sounded a little hairy up there. A lot of blood
and Chinese food lying around."

"Did you ask Darryl about the
dead guys?"

"Whaddya," the cop says,
"that kid's just a car thief. That's not his thing, killing people."

"I don't know about
that," I say as forcefully as I can. "The kid came into my office
wearing a beeper, like he works for a dealer. He was acting out, like he was
gonna get violent. So that's one thing. And then the other day I heard a story
about his friends setting fire to a crack house uptown. You caught him across
the street from a drug killing. It doesn't seem so stupid to me to bring him in
and ask him about it. He might at least know something."

Andrea nods as if the idea makes
sense to her too. But Kelly snorts. "You hear about all kinds of things
you're on the street long enough."

This time, Andrea is giving the cop
the finger into the phone. "Okay," I say. "By the way, which
detective caught the homicide case?"

"I think it's McCullough
upstairs. Or somebody. Yeah. Detective Sergeant McCullough. You want me to have
him call you?" Kelly's tone is getting remote and bored now.

Andrea is gesturing that she wants
to take care of this part of it. "Yeah, would you?" I tell Kelly.
"I'd appreciate it."

I put the phone down and ask Andrea
what's up.

She's already fussing with her hair
and rolling up her sleeves like she can't wait to get to work. "I'll go
see Detective McCullough," she says.

"Why?"

"Well, maybe now I have
something to prove to you, Steven."