City on Fire (56 page)

It took her a second to remember what he was talking about. “I’m sorry, were you busy? I don’t want to get in the way of … whatever you’ve been up to.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that,” he said. “I’ve pretty well fucked that up completely.”

She couldn’t stand to just sit silent like this, facing him through dim air. She got up to look out the window. Great reefs of light thrust up from downtown. Even more intolerable was the idea that they didn’t really know each other. If she didn’t know this man, she didn’t in this city of eight million know anyone. She turned to find him cradling his glass in his hand like a kid whose pet bird has just died. “Fucked what up, Richard?”

“Take a look.” He pulled a newspaper from the stack and sent it flapping toward her through the gloom. If not for her quick reflexes, it would have hit her in the face. Instead, it crashed harmlessly into the blinds. Then he was apologizing, but it was a man’s apology, meaning she wasn’t sure he even realized what he’d done wrong—he still seemed so abstracted, so far away. But now the orderly freight-cars of her thoughts were derailing, tumbling down embankments, because on the front of the newspaper was a yearbook photo of a pretty young woman blown up so the dots of the halftone were visible, a dark pointillism that made the face somehow instantly nostalgic. She’d seen it on every newsstand she’d passed today, she realized, but without really seeing it, the way you didn’t really see parking signs, or bus-shelter ads. It was the girl who’d been shot in Central Park several months ago. The one in the coma. But now she had features, a biography, a name. , said the caption. Right. There had been an outburst about it this morning on the radio, when she’d been waiting to hear the weather.

“This is someone you know? Is she going to be all right?”

“No one realizes yet it’s another dead end,” is all he said, and the way he stared down at his hands filled her with pity. When you were young, you had the resources to rebuild after each crater fate blasted in your life. Beyond a certain age, though, you could only wall off the damage and leave it there. She’d seen this with her dad. She wanted to tell Richard, You’re wrong, there is no such thing as a dead end, all setbacks are temporary. Or she wanted to show him, or herself. College had laid bare the ideological strutwork of such desires, but without them, there was only the dilemma: troll the singles bars for one-night stands, or go for she’d honestly lost count of how many months without sex. She watched her hands press themselves to his face. And then she was drawing it forward. His whiskers scraped against her chin, and she could taste chewing gum and Lagavulin. He was a surprisingly good kisser until, abruptly, he drew back. “You don’t want this.”

“You don’t know what I want,” she said softly, still holding his head.

“Neither do you, dear Jenny,” he said.

If she hadn’t suspected he was right, it might not have pissed her off the way it did; she might not have stood up so abruptly, or forgotten her balance—her tat tvam asi. But she did, and it did, and she did, pausing only to say, “I’ll see you around, I guess, Richard.”

Which, as it turned out, was exactly wrong.

47

PULASKI EYED AGAIN the rolled-up tabloid wedged between the passenger’s seat and the door. He’d put it there precisely to get it out of his sight, but the picture of the girl called his gaze back and back, like the blood the lady couldn’t get off her hands in that Macbeth Sherri’d taken him to see once. Today was the first day the Cicciaro case, now known to all as such, was front-page news. It wouldn’t be the last. He’d realized all along, of course, in some little-visited backroom of his consciousness, that her identity would out, the way you can tell one of your teeth is rotten long before you give in and go to the dentist. But as with a rotten tooth, he’d hoped ignoring the consequences might make them go away.

Among those consequences was the fact that he was currently cruising up Central Park West in a marked car, bound for a housing project in Harlem. His driver, a patrolman, was black. Afro-American, rather. Though this was officially Pulaski’s case now, and so Pulaski’s team, the Deputy Commissioner had made sure a liberal helping of Afro-Americans was scattered in among the two dozen officers detailed to this morning’s raid, to deflect the inevitable cries of racial bias. Pursuant to Pulaski’s arrival at the Frederick Douglass towers, the officers would sweep through hallways in their head-breaking boots, banging on doors, looking for excuses to collar any and all young men in the fifteen to twenty-five age range, to drag them outside for questioning as to their whereabouts on the night of December 31. Why outside? Because that’s where the cameras would be. And why these kids? Because it was the nearest housing project to the crime scene. Because people uptown didn’t vote. Because some rider of municipal buses, reading the fuller account the NYPD had more or less been forced to give, had suddenly recalled seeing a black man run into the park near the time of the shooting. In fact, this story seemed to back up the one Pulaski already had from that black man, who thus really had probably saved the girl’s life. In a tuxedo, right? he’d asked the detective who took the bus rider’s statement. No, the guy said. Dressed … you know, like they do. Uptown, dark bodies sat in small apartments, coils of potential energy, powder awaiting the flame. He could already hear hollering: What the fuck, I didn’t do nothing! Someone was bound to overdo it, and some rookie, white as Wonder Bread, would overreact, the nightstick would come out while women in housedresses watched from the curb, and at that point you just hoped Bill Kunstler and F. Lee Bailey weren’t picking up their phones.

Then again, what choice did he have but to go along with this? Since the girl’s name had leaked, it was as if the city’s vast reservoir of grievance had finally broken its dam. Details were what turned a symbol into a myth: Italian surname (granddaughter of “striving immigrants”); freshman at NYU (“full of promise,” never mind her grades); Long Island origins (“new to the city”; “chasing her dreams”). And then there were the pictures from the yearbook and the junior prom. She was “attractive.” “Innocent.” Because victims always were. Not that Pulaski was any better, when it came to privileging her over all the other hurting people out there. Despite the lack of forensic evidence, he’d ordered McFadden back in January to leave open the possibility that she’d been sexually assaulted; it was a way to extend to her the anonymity accorded in rape cases, even after she was no longer protected as a minor. And though he was certain there had been no such assault, the idea persisted in the leer of yesterday’s headlines. .

Though not until he reached the City this a.m. had he seen the degree to which all this was going to complicate his job. Three separate news teams had set up on the bricks out front of 1 Police Plaza. Must have scurried over from the federal courthouse where they more often camped out these days. One reporter had spread deli napkins on his shoulders to catch falling makeup as he touched up his face for the cameras. Another was already intoning into a microphone, in a beam of light that made the spring day dull by comparison. No one seemed to notice Pulaski limping toward the stairless side entrance. His face wasn’t known, his cases never got much press, which was part of his not being taken seriously by the brass at 1PP—of him having reached the zenith of his career at Deputy Inspector.

His office here was back off a forgotten fifth-floor hallway whose overhead light had burned out. He’d unclipped his crutches, leaned them precisely against the desk, lowered himself to the cushioned chair. His hands were curved from the rubber grips; he pressed them against the desk blotter. Deformation, was the word for the flattening of three dimensions down to two. Funny, the things that popped into your head when you just learned to sit still. Maybe if he locked the door, unplugged the phone, closed his eyes … but the phone at that moment began to ring. It was his bosses, summoning him downstairs.

A meeting, they called it, but he knew it was an interrogation. The Chief Inspector’s office, with its burled wood and deep-pile carpet, seemed out of place in this building, like an antebellum parlor crash-landed in the Brutalist ’70s. Pulaski had been in it maybe twice before, to witness the dressing-down of one of his detectives. This time, he himself was the lucky contestant, and they didn’t even wait for the secretary to close the door.

“Looks like you’ve got a real shit-storm on your hands, Pulaski.” This was the Deputy Commish, enthroned in a high-backed chair of imitation oxblood leather. “I’ve got the Mayor’s office calling to ask why we’ve been suppressing your victim’s name,” he continued. “You know what that looks like?”

“Like shit, is what it looks like,” said the Chief Inspector, who stood to the side of his own desk, in a zone of false neutrality. He lobbed a copy of the Daily News onto the blotter. Pulaski knew better than to reach for it; the bosses were a long-running vaudeville act, they couldn’t help themselves, and this was part of their show.

“We know it’s not true, of course, that this particular case isn’t on your very frontmost burner, Pulaski, but frankly, we’re having a hard time explaining the thinking here.”

“So why don’t you explain it to us, Pulaski.”

It seemed to Pulaski self-evident. “You’re saying you wanted the Fourth Estate queued up outside months ago? One Son of Sam isn’t enough?”

The Deputy Commish looked at the Chief Inspector, or vice versa.

“Why don’t I explain something to you, you little prick. You know how many bodies we caught in this city last year? That’s assuming your victim doesn’t kick? We’ve got federal funds riding on our clearance rate. Next year’s an election year.”

“You’re taking it away from me?” Pulaski asked.

“The mouth on this guy. No, you dumb shit, you’re going to go out and hang this on someone if it kills you. You’re going to drag somebody before the cameras and say, by God, the city’s safe again, and then it’s the D.A.’s problem. Or you know whose ass it is?”

He had a pretty good guess.

“Your ass, Pulaski.”

“Well, I can’t work it all by myself. I’m going to need some men, some overtime.”

“Of course you are,” said the Chief Inspector. “For starters, a little canary tipped off Channel 5 and Channel 9 you’d be conducting a roundup this morning at the Douglass Houses.” He looked at his watch. “Camera trucks will be on the scene at eleven, which gives you about an hour to get organized. I want to see cuffs, Pulaski. I want Afros ducking into cars. The personnel requests are right here. All you need to do is initial.”

He’d barely had time to grab his coat, and whatever else he might need. Now shadows of the Park’s trees, newly in leaf, raked the windshield of his squad car. After weeks of rain, the sun was out, a bulb in a toy oven. Coffee had leaked from the lid of his cup and soaked a neat half-moon into the thighs of his trousers. “Pull over,” he said, out of nowhere.

His driver looked startled. Subordinates often seemed to have little idea of how to respond to Pulaski, but he couldn’t very well drive himself; he’d taken the ferry in this morning, leaving back in his garage the Plymouth the city had customized for him.

“Just pull over for a minute, please.”

He opened his door, dumped a third of the overfull coffee onto the paving stones that edged the sidewalk. It collected in runnels, ran toward the curb. You wouldn’t have guessed a slope was there. As he reached for his crutches, the radio crackled on the dash. Kilo, alpha, five, nine. Come back. The driver looked over, tense eyes, dark brow.

“Tell them to sit tight. I have to see a horse dealer.”

Another upside of being a cripple was that people eventually stopped expecting you to spell things out; they figured an unplanned stop like this, you must be making for your health.

“You want me to come with?” the driver said. “That mud’s slippery. I almost broke my tailbone this morning getting out to the car.”

“Just sit tight,” Pulaski said. “I’ll be right back.”

It took him five minutes to pick his way back along the path Samantha Cicciaro had followed that night. She hadn’t been dragged, obviously, or it would have showed on the snow, which meant what? She’d known the shooter. There were already a couple of Santería candles near where the body had been. Soon, it would become a shrine, heaps of flowers and stuffed animals. But when she God forbid died, or the case went cold, this would become just another path again, these bushes just bushes. Who remembered what block Kitty Genovese had lived on? Who remembered Daddy Browning, or his child-lover Peaches?

He emerged onto the Sheep Meadow almost exactly where he’d stood three months ago, the morning after the shooting. In his overcoat pocket was a plastic bag containing the wadded jeans he’d found then. He’d kept the discovery secret because he’d wanted to follow it up alone. Which had led to the tattoo. Which had led nowhere. Yet if he produced it now, it would look suspicious as all get-out, someone would figure out eventually he’d sat on evidence. But he saw again a mother in a housedress, in the shadow of a housing project, watching a nightstick draw blood. He saw Sherri, the mother she would have been, charging like a lioness into the fray. All he wanted, really, was to deserve her.

He emerged from the Park doing his best to hold the evidence aloft and still maintain control of his crutches. He knocked on the window, waited for the driver to lean over and roll it down. “Call off the rodeo.”

“What?”

“Tell them it’s off, I’m calling it off. Have them send the whole team down here instead. We’ve caught a break. But we need to re-sweep the park.”

Again, with the eyebrows: skepticism, concern … relief? “You sure?” the driver asked.

“Of course I’m sure, darn it. Pick up the radio—or no, give it here. I’ll do it myself.”

48

THE WOMAN BEYOND THE WINDOW was coughing and coughing. One could hear it even over the corrido and the few other patrons at the bar—and that was before a spasm of particular violence so racked her that her head struck the glass, not three feet from where a solitary man sat, brooding over his gin. To judge by the square of cardboard he’d seen on his way in, the story that had brought her to this milk crate in the East Village in the coldwater spring of 1977 was rather involved. It hung about her neck on a length of twine, whole magic-markered paragraphs of extenuation and woe, but the cough broke her off at Hey, Mister.… He’d had a tickle in his own throat a few weeks ago, which spoke to the promiscuity of the local microbes, but hadn’t let it ripen into this noisome hack. Or was it a play for sympathy? Among the persistent errors this city’s news media made was to deny the poor any capacity for ratiocination. They were like animals, only worse, as actual animals knew better (not to mince words) than to shit where they ate. It was a measure of Amory Gould’s seriousness, his heroic objectivity, that he knew this not to be the case. For two years, as orphaned teenagers, he and Felicia had lived in a house without electricity, burning furniture for warmth, eating out of such cans as Amory could buy on a delivery boy’s pay. They weren’t animals. Just, circumstantially, closer to the threshold of survival. But there in the lizard brain, you learned you would gladly crawl over others of your species if it meant moving up. Fellow-feeling never got anyone out of Buffalo. Or remade the Bronx in its image. Now, as the woman coughed again, he set aside the predictable headlines of the Daily News and headed for the payphone by the lavatories.