Slow Motion Riot (21 page)

"You know this isn't
right," Detective Sergeant Bob Mc-Cullough was saying. "I mean, you
know the difference between right and wrong, don't you?"

The boy didn't say anything. He
kept his head tucked inside his parka and quivered like a small frightened
sparrow. The other detective in the room threw a paper clip and swore loudly.

"Now let's not be
impatient," McCullough said in a nice voice. "Eddie here just needs a
chance to get accustomed."

Very slowly, Eddie Johnson took his
head out of his coat and looked around. His eyes followed the border where the
blue paint met the white paint about five feet up the wall. He was watching
that border like it was a waterline and he was drowning underneath it,
McCullough thought. In a way, he was drowning. With the new charge he was
facing for carrying the unregistered handgun, and the old probation term he had
for throwing rocks at cars in the Bronx, he could get as much as four years in
prison. His only chance now was to make a deal.

"These things that you
do," McCullough said softly. "You can't keep doing them. It's not a
life." He shook his head.

Eddie Johnson grimaced a little as
the other detective brought his fist down hard on the desk. "Enough of
this shit," he told McCullough. "Let's just lock this mutt up."

"Our friends at Narcotics
wouldn't be happy to hear you say that, Lou," McCullough said, getting out
of his chair and walking around like he'd just gotten off a horse. "They
think Eddie here can help us out. They have a lot of faith in him."

"Ah, he can't even fuckin'
talk," said the detective named Lou who had enormous thighs and hair on
his head that looked like it belonged in his armpit.

"Yes he can," said
McCullough. "Can't you talk, Eddie?"

"Yes," Eddie said in a
quiet, blunted voice.

He looked at both detectives
warily, as though he sensed they were trying to confuse him. After a couple of
seconds he put his head back inside his parka. The detective named Lou picked
up a copy of the Manhattan telephone directory and began waving it around menacingly.

"You know what I think?"
McCullough said, facing Eddie. "I think getting arrested the other day is
gonna turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. I really think
so."

Eddie brought his head out of his
coat and looked at McCullough curiously. "When you put your head in your
coat like that, you're chewing on something, aren't you?" McCullough said.

Slowly, reluctantly, the boy began
to nod.

It took just a little while longer
for McCullough to get Eddie to open the coat and show him the chicken bones
that he carried around in his pocket and chewed on when he got scared. Then the
detective sent out for a ham and cheese sandwich. Eddie gobbled down half of it
and stuffed the other half in his pocket.

"Before you didn't have
anybody looking out for you," McCullough told him. "Those people who
were supposed to be your friends didn't help you out when you got arrested the
other day. So now you have us. And we'll look out for you. Okay?"

"Okay," Eddie mumbled,
sitting forward in the steel chair that badly needed to be oiled.

"We're like your family now.
Okay?"

"Okay." The kid looked like
he was about to start crying again.

"So tell us exactly what you
told those detectives up in the Bronx," McCullough said. "Tell us
about your friend Darryl King."

I'm standing behind a building in
Washington Heights, waiting for the action to begin. Bill and Angel have gone
in the front, looking for an old breaking-and-entering guy who's missed three
appointments with the judge. In all likelihood they'll just grab the guy and
haul him out. But Bill says that given his case history, there's a chance the
guy will try to make a break for it through the back entrance, so I better be ready.

Sure enough, within two minutes, I
see a runty little white guy with his hair in a ponytail and wearing a lot of
jewelry climbing down the back fire escape. He looks like a renegade from the
1960s, except his face appears to have been run over by a tractor. He jumps
down off the fire escape and I go chasing him across a vacant, rubble-strewn
lot. Just like TV. He's not too young and not too swift, so I catch him and
tackle him easily, as though we were playing touch football in the park. The
guy doesn't even seem too angry with me. He's probably been caught and locked
up so many times that it doesn't make much difference to him. In fact, he gives
me a little wink, like he admires my technique.

I've got to admit that I'm starting
to like this job a little. After two years of heart-wrenching cases that never
seemed to end, it's a pleasure being liberated from the glum social work
pieties and bureaucratic snares. I like having people respond when I order them
around. And I like getting out into the field and doing physical work, instead
of sitting behind a desk all day.

The worst part of the job is not
having any time to catch up on my paperwork and see Andrea. The best part is
getting to hang out with Angel and Bill. When I was in school, I missed out on
things like cruising around with the boys on a Saturday night. Now, for the
first time in my life, I feel like one of the guys.

After we process the
breaking-and-entering guy, they take me on a sightseeing tour through Harlem
and the rest of Upper Manhattan, even though I could use the time to knock off
some of that paperwork and see some of my old clients.

Driving without any particular pattern
or direction, they start off at the Audubon ballroom on West 165th Street,
where Malcolm X was murdered, and then decide to race down to the Abyssinian
Baptist Church on West 138th Street, where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., once
preached. We take a detour over to P. T. Barnum's old house near Sugar Hill,
with its weird cornices and gables, and then head south past the apartment
building on Edgecombe Avenue where Duke Ellington rehearsed his band and
sometimes watched baseball at the Polo Grounds from his window. I've actually
been around here before because I went to City College, but I don't let on
because Bill and Angel are obviously having a good time playing tour guides and
local historians.

We swing by the beautiful old
houses on Striver's Row and then drive past the Apollo, where Bill says he saw
James Brown and Bobby Blue Bland perform years ago. Finally they show me the
old whorehouses and numbers joints on St. Nicholas Avenue and encourage me to
have a look inside tor myself.

"They love white meat in
there," Bill says, pointing to a shabby tenement. "Jack Kennedy used
to go in there, you know."

"What?" I give him a
dubious look from the backseat.

"You knew that, didn't
you?"

"Yeah," says Angel.

"Sure," Bill says,
putting his left leg up on the dashboard. "Jack Kennedy went to that
whorehouse every time he was in Harlem. Right, Angel?"

"Right."

"Sure." Bill gestures
with a lit cigar. "He was having an affair with Josephine Baker. You knew
that, Baum, didn't you?"

"Josephine Baker?"

"That's right," Bill says
in a deadpan voice, rolling down the window. "And Moms Mabley too. You
knew Kennedy was fucking Moms too, didn't you, Baum..."

Behind the wheel, Angel is starting
to shake with laughter. Bill continues to insist that the president was having
an affair with an eighty-year-old black female comic.

"Kennedy was fucking Moms
Mabley?" I ask.

"Of course," Bill says
with utter confidence. "She gave him head..."

"What about Slappy
White?" I say. "Was Kennedy fucking Slappy White?"

"The old guy who was on Sanford
and Son?" Bill asks.

"Yeah." I lean back in my
seat and open the beer Bill gave me. "I heard Slappy wouldn't have
JFK..."

The two of them start laughing and
slapping my hand. "Pretty funny for a white guy, Baum," Bill says.

We pass a bunch of middle-aged guys
standing outside a tenement, polishing BMWs and Mercedes in the afternoon sun.
Given the neighborhood, you'd think they might be drug dealers, but they seem a
little old and ratty. Drugs are supposed to be a younger man's game. Maybe
they're just paid to wash the cars. In the meantime, Angel fiddles with the
radio, trying to find a station we can all agree on. Most of what he gets is
static, except for one station playing a reverberating electric guitar introduction.

"What is this shit?"
Angel asks.

" ' Welcome to the Jungle' by
Guns N' Roses," I say. "That's old already."

Angel and Bill both turn their
heads to look at me. "The young generation, Angel," Bill says.
"We need them to be our eyes and ears."

I shrug. I'm having a good time
now. I've even succeeded in putting Darryl King out of my mind for the moment.

"You know what I like?"
Bill says as we pass Sylvia's Restaurant, the Casablanca Bar, and Beeper World
on Lenox Avenue. "Country music."

"Is that right?" I rest
my elbows on the back of his seat.

"Sure," says Bill.
"You knew that, didn't you? Some of it's like poetry, you know, the way it
tells a story. That's all we listened to around the Mekong Delta 'cause I had
all them hillbilly rednecks in my unit. Who's the guy who does 'Okie from Muskogee'?"

"Merle Haggard," I say,
drawing on my own country record collection.

"Yeah." Bill chomps down
on his cigar. "I knew a guy from Muskogee over in Vietnam. Only he didn't
like that song. Henry Lee Oliver. Blond-haired white boy about your height, Baum.
Man, he hated that song."

"Why?" I ask. I've always
sort of liked that song in spite of its belligerent, hippie-baiting lyrics.

"That's what I always wondered
too," Bill says. "You'd figure a guy from Muskogee would consider
that song his national anthem. But he never wanted to be around when they
played that song. He said it made all the people where he came from sound like
rednecks and he wasn't like that. Taught me a lesson."

"What?" I ask.

"That you can never know what
to expect from people. I'll tell you, up until then I thought all white people
were rednecks."

"It's just most of them,"
Angel says, looking over from the driver's seat.

"Yeah," Bill tells him.
"But not Henry Lee Oliver. He was all right. He hated that 'Okie from
Muskogee.' He liked, you know, whaddyacallit... 'Ruby.' "

He starts to hum the melody. After
a couple of bars I recognize it as "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to
Town," a terribly sad song about a guy who comes back from the war as a
paraplegic and winds up lying in bed helpless and alone while his wife goes out
on the town with other men. Angel and I join in for the chorus, and we sound
pretty good within the confines of the car.

Bill stops singing and for once he
looks somewhat reflective. "Yeah, Henry Lee used to hum that song over and
over when he went to sleep at night. I guess it must've spooked him or
something. He used to say how awful it would be if something like that happened
to you. You know, getting crippled in the war and coming home to see your woman
fucking somebody else."

"So whatever happened to Henry
Lee?" I ask.

"He got shot in the head
outside a rice paddy," Bill says, casually throwing his cigar butt out the
window. "So he shouldn't have bothered worrying about the whole
thing..."

As we make the turn onto 125th
Street, two things hit me. Number one is that there's a lot more to Bill than
I'd thought. Angel's right about him: He talks tough, but he's just as mixed up
as the rest of us. I wonder if there's some level of self-loathing going on
when he calls black people "animals" and stuff like that. The other
thing that strikes me is a vague sense of unease. But that slips out of my mind
quickly as we pull up to a row of Senegalese peddlers selling umbrellas,
wallets, and vinyl handbags on the sidewalk. From the Senegalese guys on my
caseload, I speak enough of their native tongue, Wolof, to negotiate a good
deal for Bill and Angel to buy their wives some nice scarves.

Bill starts to give me the
thumbs-up sign, but then the walkie-talkie on his belt blasts static. He picks
it up, says a few words into the receiver, and then listens for a few seconds.

He raises his bushy eyebrows at me
and then signs off.

"That was for you," he
tells me. "You're supposed to give some cop a call."

"Oh hi, how you doin', Mr.
Baum. This is Detective Sergeant Bob McCullough from the two-five..."

"Oh yeah, I tried to reach out
to you before." I put a finger in my ear so the noise from the street
doesn't drown out what he's saying on the pay phone.

"Your name is Baum, right? Not
Byrne like you told Kelly?" I admit that's true and McCullough has a good laugh.

" 'Kay, listen, buddy boy, you
and your friend gave us a good tip there about this Darryl King guy. So the
other day, we picked up an individual name of Edward Johnson in the Bronx. He's
like... not retarded, you know. Just weird. Anyway, the first point of the
thing is this guy Johnson can connect King to those crack dealers who got
popped in Harlem."

"That's great," I say.
"Now you can put the guy away."

"Well, not so fast,"
McCullough says. "This guy, Johnson, our informant. He's had some problems
with your people." From the insinuating way he says "your
people," I wonder if he means the Jews.

He soon disabuses me of that
notion. "Johnson is on probation in the Bronx for a rock-throwing
thing," he says. "But he's been a bad boy. He just got picked up
again carrying an unregistered handgun and a quantity of marijuana. So that
could get him... whaddyacallit?"

I hear the click and put another
quarter in. "Violated," I say.

"Yeah, violated."

"I think I catch your drift.
He'll cooperate with you if he can stay on probation."

"Kee-rect," says
McCullough.

"However, you need to convince
him that the threat of the violation and the revocation of his probation are
real..."

"Exactly."

"I'll talk to my people."

I spend another quarter and call
Ms. Lang with the information. She'll call the assistant commissioner for the
borough, who'll call the assistant commissioner in the Bronx, who'll talk to
her branch chief, and eventually it'll all come back to Eddie Johnson's probation
officer in the Bronx, who probably has no idea his client's been rearrested. In
the end, Eddie Johnson will agree to cooperate with the police and a warrant
will be issued for Darryl King's arrest.

This puts me in a good mood, and I
come bounding back to the car where Bill and Angel have been waiting patiently
with these odd-looking smiles.

"What's up?" I ask as we
pull away from the curb.

"Well, we've been doing
nothing but our cases the last few days," says Angel. "So we went to
your old supervisor Ms. Lang and got a couple of your old cases."

He hands me a file over the back of
the seat. Richard Silver's name is written in bright red letters across the
top. I feel my face instantly start to crumple. "Oh fuck! I wanted to get
rid of this guy."

Bill and Angel burst out laughing,
as we pass a glossy waterfall of a high rise in the East Nineties and keep
going down Second Avenue. I get a picture in my mind of Richard Silver giving
me that patronizing raised eyebrow and I feel like getting out of the car right
now. "What do we want with this case?" I ask.

"He's another one of your bad
boys, Baum," Bill says. "He missed an appointment with his new P.O.
and still hasn't done his community service requirement."

We pass a bus that has a picture of
a girl who looks like Andrea in the scotch ad on the side. I wonder why she
hasn't been returning my calls and then I start to feel empty inside. I reach
for my Silly Putty, since I can't bear the stench of a cigarette with Bill's cigar
smoke in here.

I glance through my old reports on
Silver and see, for once, I haven't made any serious spelling mistakes.
"So he's not getting violated?"

"No. No. Just a gentle
reminder to keep his appointments."

Bill checks his watch. We've been
working for nearly ten hours and the overtime is starting to pile up. That may
be the most important thing Bill and Angel have taught me: how to put in for
overtime without drawing undue attention from your supervisor.

"So we're going to Sutton
Place now, right?" Bill asks me, his brown eyes amused in the rearview
mirror.

"That's the address Silver
gave me," I say, closing the folder just as I start to feel carsick.

I ring the soft, chiming bell next
to the mahogany doors of Richard Silver's apartment and try to think of a
snappy comeback to however he's going to put me down. For a few seconds,
"yeah, your mutha" are the only words that come to mind. One door
opens and a stout Hispanic woman with close-set eyes looks me over and checks
out Bill and Angel. She wears a white maid's uniform and has no expression.

"Hi, the doorman just rang us
up," I say. "Is Mr. Silver here?"

Nothing registers on her face. I
get a strong feeling that she doesn't speak English. Then Angel talks to her in
Spanish and she steps aside. We walk down a long foyer and into an entrance
gallery with a marble floor and a high, rounded ceiling. The air-conditioning
keeps the temperature comfortable, around sixty-seven degrees. To the left, a
pair of ivory-colored doors with gold handles open with a sound like a
thoroughbred's hooves hitting the ground. An attractive woman with long brown
hair stands there smiling. She wears a blue silk bathrobe and black high heels.