Night Work (6 page)

I got in my black Volkswagen. I turned on some more Ayler while I drove up Broadway. It was an Ayler kind of day all around, that mixture of joy and sadness in everything he played. That’s how I felt today. But I only had a minute or two to enjoy it before I turned into the parking lot.

I got out and went into the Ulster County Probation building. Five years ago, we were working in a converted funeral home up on Pearl Street. Then we moved down here on Broadway, to this new building where everything about the place told you there would be no nonsense allowed. On weekdays, there’d be two county deputies stationed by the front door. You’d have to sign in and then walk through a metal detector. In the old building, you just walked right in and sat in the common waiting room. You might have
had a sixty-year-old sex offender in the same room with a fifteen-year-old girl. But no longer. Now you enter one of two completely separate worlds, the left side of the building for adults, the right for juveniles, with no chance of contact.

We don’t do appointments on Sundays, so there were no deputies waiting in the lobby. I opened the front door with my key and locked it behind me, walking through the dead metal detector into the juvenile section.

We have enclosed offices on this side, unlike the adult side, where everything’s wide-open cubicles. There’s a high priority for privacy here, and a greater need for space when you have a parent or two joining in on the visit. I went to my office and unlocked the door, sat down at my desk, and dove right into a folder full of PSIs. “PSI” stands for presentence investigation—it’s a thorough report we do when the court finds a defendant guilty. Before sentencing, the judge will want to know about any mitigating factors surrounding the crime, the impact on the victim or victims, the defendant’s family and personal background, mental and physical health, history of drug or alcohol use. Then finally there’s a recommended sentence of either prison time or probation, which the judge is free to agree with or completely ignore. The state requires the report for any felony, or for any crime committed by a juvenile. Which means I end up doing a hell of a lot of them.

Already I could feel myself relaxing for the first
time that day. It felt good to be here. Or if not exactly good, then comfortable. Some days it felt like everything else I did was just pretend. The training, the music. All by myself, just pretending to have a life. Until I get back here in this office, at this desk … This was where I belonged, no doubt about it, reading over somebody’s PSI instead of being outside enjoying a perfect August day.

The building had felt empty when I came in, but now I could hear a chair rolling around in Larry’s office upstairs. He had probably heard me opening the front door, which meant he was probably on his way down the stairs. About thirty seconds later, he poked his head around my door.

“Joe,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Catching up.” I didn’t look up at him.

“Everything okay? You know I’ve got coverage today.” Meaning he was the lucky guy on call in case of an emergency, in case any of our clients did something truly monumental.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I’m just going over some stuff.”

He hung there in the doorway. I could tell he wasn’t sure what to say to me. In the three months he’d been there, I’m not sure he’d ever spoken a totally confident word to me.

“How’s it going with that Schuler kid?”

“Wayne? He wasn’t home on Friday.”

“Again?”

“I think he’s ducking me.”

“That’s not good.”

No kidding, I thought. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on him.”

Larry nodded. Still not getting me at all, that man. I didn’t think he was a bad guy because of it. Hell, I don’t get myself most of the time. My old boss, Bob, he was a tough act to follow, in my book at least. He knew I was good at this stuff, even if I went a little overboard sometimes. More importantly, he was here when it all happened, the whole thing with Laurel. He was the one who made me take some time off. He was the one who kept in touch every week, until it was time to bring me back in. Then he was the one who didn’t say a word if I came in every single day, even if it screwed up his overtime numbers.

He’s retired now. I hated to see him leave. They brought Larry in from some county upstate, way up north of Albany. He knows what I’ve been through, of course. On paper, he knows. But he obviously still doesn’t know quite what to do with me. In fact, I probably scare the hell out of him.

“You feeling all right today, Joe?”

I looked up at him. “Yeah. I’m good.”

“Okay, well … I’ll be up in my office if you need me.”

“Got it.”

He nodded, raised a hand as if to make some sort of gesture, changed his mind, and turned around. He went back up the stairs. A few seconds later, I could hear his chair rolling around again.

My cell phone rang in my pocket. As I took it out, I wondered if it could be Marlene. But no, the caller ID read
KINGSTON PD.

“Howie,” I said as I answered it. “What’s going on?”

“JT, I just wanted to hear about the big date.”

Howie Borello had been my best friend for as long as I could remember, since when we were growing up right here in Kingston. He was with me that night, in fact, at my bachelor party. He hadn’t paced himself as well as I did. By the time we got to the strip club, he was already passed out in the car. Now, for the past two years he’d been calling down to the Westchester Police Department at least once a week, trying to find out why the investigation hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d been making a real nuisance of himself, this loud, stubborn detective from up the river. Another reason he was my best friend in the world.

“We had a nice dinner,” I said. “Very nice.”

“Come on, spill it. Did you have breakfast, too?”

I laughed. “Howie, come on.”

“Just tell me. Was there meaningful physical contact?”

“Was there what?”

He’s trying too hard, I thought. He’s trying to make me sound like a normal guy going out on a normal date.

“You know,” he said. “Something beyond shaking hands, a kiss on the cheek …”

“Yes, okay? There was some amount of meaningful physical contact.”

“Hot damn. How come I never get good blind dates?”

“You’re married, Howie.”

“No, I mean back in the day. When my blind dates opened the door, I usually screamed and ran.”

“I think you’re remembering it backwards,” I said. “What’s going on at the station?”

“It’s pretty quiet right now. But you never know.”

“I’m gonna go take a run at a kid pretty soon. I’ll talk to ya later, okay?”

“You gonna be at your usual spot tonight?”

“I might be.” Meaning absolutely yes. Sunday night was the one time all week I’d go to the Shamrock and have a few.

“Maybe I’ll stop by. You can tell me more.”

“Elaine will love that.”

“She’ll be fine if she knows I’m with you.”

“Okay, so maybe I’ll see you.”

“When are you gonna go out with Marlene again?”

“Soon. I hope.”

“When am I gonna meet her?”

“Never. I hope.”

“You’re a funny man, JT.”

“Good-bye, Howie.”

I put the cell phone in my pocket. Trying way too hard, I thought. You had to love him.

I saw Larry coming down the stairs again, just as I was leaving.

“Heading out?” he said.

“Think I’ll go pay a visit to Wayne.”

“On a Sunday?”

“A surprise visit,” I said. “It’s my specialty.”

“Okay, then.” A long pause. “I’ll see you later, Joe.”

With that, I was out the door. No costume, no cape, but I was about to become Probation Officer Man again, ready to kick some ass.

I
didn’t have to drive too far on this call. Some days, I’d put two or three hundred miles on my car, getting from one end of Ulster County to the other. I work mostly at the main office here on Broadway, but we’ve got another up in Saugerties, one down in New Paltz, one way the hell out in Ellenville. It’s over a thousand square miles, one of the biggest counties in the state, spreading from the Hudson River all the way out to the Catskill Mountains.

Most of it’s still undeveloped. Lots of trees and open fields. It’s no surprise people move up here from the city, when you can catch a train and be in Manhattan in less than two hours, then come up here to your house in the woods. Listen to the coyotes howling at night and the bears taking down your bird feeder.

Of course, Ulster County has its share of problems, too. Kingston’s the closest thing to a real city, with gangs and drugs and everything else. New Paltz has one of the state universities, with everything that comes with it—the binge drinking, the sexual assaults, more drugs. There’s Woodstock, of course, at the base of the Catskill Mountains, with the thriving
hippie culture and yeah, even more drugs. The Woodstock Green is practically an open-air pharmaceutical marketplace.

That’s the side of things I see most of the time now. Every single day, I’m dealing with somebody using drugs or selling drugs or doing something else illegal because of the drugs. Sometimes it seems like it’s all I do anymore, because low-level drug crimes usually mean probation for first-time offenders. And probation means me in your life. I’m part cop, part social worker, part guidance counselor, part rehab coordinator, part bounty hunter. Every hour of every day, I’m your official court-designated guardian angel. I can come to your house on a school-day morning and drag your ass out of bed, because going to school is an absolutely nonnegotiable part of your probation. Or I can come calling on a Sunday, like I’m doing today, when everybody’s home and I can see what’s really going on with your whole family.

I headed back down Broadway, toward the water. Passing the gym, then the two hills on either side of the street, City Hall on one side, Kingston High School on the other, where Howie and I both spent four colorful years. Now one of us was a cop, the other a PO. Hard to believe. When the fall comes around, I’ll go back to keeping once-a-week office hours there, in the same school I couldn’t wait to get out of. Every once in a while I’ll run into an adult who’ll seem shocked by this idea, that a kid would get out of class early to go keep his probation appointment. I had one
parent ask me with a straight face if I wasn’t worried about stigmatizing my clients this way. I told her that getting excused from biology class to go meet with your probation officer was worth about a hundred points in street cred. If you were one of the few kids who ended up wearing an ankle bracelet, it was a hundred points more. I’ve seen kids wearing shorts in the wintertime just to show them off.

I kept driving down Broadway, all the way down to the Rondout District. This was the low end of the city, the place where things were once made and shipped out onto the Hudson River. Bricks, for many years. Then steel.

There’s a strange sort of renewal going on down there now. You go all the way down to the water and you pass all the new condominiums on one side of the street, the new restaurants and little shops on the other. You see all the boats tied up at the docks, the people walking around enjoying the day. A hundred yards later the whole place is overrun with weeds as high as your head. Then there’s the old meatpacking plant, a spectacular ruin of crumbling brick and broken glass, and farther down an abandoned cement factory. That’s where I drove now, past Block Park and the kids out playing basketball. The houses were smaller on this side of town. People lived closer to the bone.

The one I was looking for was a duplex. I parked in the driveway, went to the front door, and knocked. I stood there listening for a while. I heard a man yelling, but I couldn’t tell if it was from this side of the
duplex or the other side. I knocked again. Finally, the kid’s mother opened the door. She was dressed, but there was no mistaking the fact that I had just woken her up.

“Claire,” I said. “Good morning. Is Wayne here?”

“No,” she said, yawning.

“He missed his appointment on Friday,” I said. “He was supposed to come see me at the gym.”

Wayne had been assigned to me for about three months now. He and some friends had broken into a couple of houses, stolen some cash, a couple of laptops, some prescription medicine. The kid who seemed to be the leader was from Newburgh. That’s in a different county, so I’d never even heard of him before. What he was doing up here running around with Wayne is something I never quite understood, but apparently that kid had a pretty long history. So he ended up drawing nine months at Coxsackie. Wayne was a first-timer, so he got a year’s probation. One year of Joe Trumbull, for better or worse.

“He’s not here now.” Her hair was wet, pressed down flat on one side of her head. I was guessing she’d taken her shower and then given up on the day already, going right back to bed.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure,” she said. You couldn’t have ironed her voice any flatter.

She stepped aside and I came in past her. I took a quick look around the living room without being too obvious about it. The last time I was here I had seen a
roach clip sitting in one of the ashtrays. If it’s in the living room, that usually means it belongs to Mom or Dad. If the kid’s on probation, in a real way the whole family is, too.

Of course, here there was only one parent to deal with, at least for the time being. “Have you heard from your husband?”

“He called yesterday.”

He was an Army Reserve, currently driving a truck somewhere in Afghanistan.

“Is everything okay? You seem kind of down.”

She shrugged. “He’s been gone a long time. It’s hard.”

“I imagine.”

She gave me a look as if she might argue with me. Like there was no way I
could
imagine. Of course, I had my own story, but I’d never use it that way.

“Do you know where Wayne is? Is he going to be back anytime soon?”

“He went out with one of his friends,” she said. “To the diner, I think.”

“He didn’t say anything about the appointment?”

“I think he said something about his hand hurting.”