Slow Motion Riot (22 page)

"I'm Gloria Silver," she
says in a husky voice.

We awkwardly introduce ourselves and
shake hands with her. Up close, she still looks good, just a little older than
she first appeared. At least forty-two, with sharp worry lines on either side
of her mouth and a few rings around her throat. The skin under her eyes is a
little tight, possibly from premature cosmetic surgery.

"Richard isn't in right
now," she says. "But please do stay awhile."

There's something a little needy in
her voice, and something else strange in her eyes. Flaky lady. She really wants
us to stay. And she doesn't even know us. We give each other confused looks.
This whole trip downtown has been for nothing, especially since we could've
gone home early today. After a few seconds' hesitation, Angel and Bill excuse
themselves.

"Mr. Baum can handle this
himself, ma'am," Bill says. "We have to be off for the weekend."
I give them both irritated looks, but Bill just flashes a sly smile at me, like
he's saying, "Go get 'em, tiger."

Now I have to stick around for a
few minutes, just to be polite. I decide I'll ask a couple of questions about
Richard Silver and leave at the first chance. She guides me through the living
room into her den. The walls are covered in salmon silk moire and the carpet is
a delicate Oriental tapestry. The tables and chairs are nineteenth-century
French antiques. The Donahue show is just ending on the giant TV screen. She
goes to the bar, picks up a crystal glass, and fills it with Sprite and ice.

"Would you like something to
drink?" she asks me, and then nervously looks over at the maid, who is
standing there, still absolutely expressionless, in the doorway.

"Just water, please."

She fumbles around the bar until
she finds the ice bucket and the stainless-steel pitcher of water. Haphazardly
she pours it, and the maid doesn't move an inch. "We're just going to be
in here a little while, Iris," Mrs. Silver says to the maid. Her voice is
tentative, as if she's dying for the maid's approval.

Iris barely acknowledges that she's
been spoken to. She puts her hands on her hips, takes a deep breath, and then
slowly walks away.

"I think she likes you,"
Mrs. Silver tells me.

She must be kidding, I think.
"I'm worried Iris is angry with me," she confides in a low, anxious
voice. "She gave me a look this morning as she was changing the
bed..." She shakes her head and turns the TV volume down with the remote
control.

I sit down at the end of her long
gray sofa. She sits a foot or two away, the slit in her bathrobe revealing a
pair of skinny legs wrapped around each other. One black high heel wiggles on
her foot. The scent of strong, expensive perfume is in the air; it reminds me
of something much older women would wear to a funeral. A long, uneasy silence
passes and she sniffs three or four times. I never would've thought Richard
Silver was married to such a strange lady. I guess I imagined him zipping
around town with a redhead in a sports car or something.

"So what time are you
expecting Richard to get home?" I ask.

"I'm not."

"I don't understand."

"Our divorce was finalized
last week."

"Huh ... I mean, well... I'm sorry."

This whole scene is starting to get
a little too strange for me. I try to figure out a way to get up and leave
immediately. She looks me straight in the eye and starts singing, "Put the
blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame..." She gestures for me to sing
along with her. I smile nervously and look down at my water glass.

After a verse or two, she stops
singing. "I actually haven't seen Richard in a few months," she says.
"Not since he took up with that blonde chippie ..."

I have no idea who or what she's
talking about. I didn't know any of these things about Richard Silver before.
But that just shows how little you find out about anybody from sitting in a
cubicle with them for five minutes.

"Do you know Richard
well?" Mrs. Silver is asking.

"Not really."

"Richard is a very...
dominating personality," she says, scratching a spot near the side of her
nose and then leaving her finger there. I pray she's not about to start picking
it. "He's very good at getting something when he needs it. Of course, you
know he did very well in our divorce."

"Is that so?"

"Well, my dear, he should
have." She straightens her spine. "He paid off the judge and my
lawyer..."

Oh boy. I think, she is really
nuts. "It looks like things didn't work out too badly," I say in a
voice that's supposed to settle things down so I can leave gracefully.
"After all, you got this great apartment..." I rock back on the sofa
and prepare to flee.

"But that's all I got,"
she says, raising her voice suddenly and bitterly. "That and a lousy
thirty-five hundred a month for alimony and child support. How am I supposed to
live on that? I ask you. Do you know what Richard did?! He went to..."

Her voice is just a decibel or two
shy of hysteria when Iris the maid appears at the door again. This time her
lips are pursed and her eyebrows are raised.

"Oh, Iris," Mrs. Silver
says apprehensively. "Everything is just fine."

Iris leaves again, without a word.
"What do you think she meant by that look she just gave me?" Mrs.
Silver asks.

"I have no idea."

As she chews her knuckles and talks
on frantically, I start to get a glimmer of understanding. Mrs. Silver doesn't
work. The signs are that she stays in the house all day, thinking about her
divorce. I mean, it's past five and she's still in her bathrobe. Other than her
son, Leonard, who's in school all day, the only human being she sees on a
regular basis is her maid, Iris, who speaks no English. So in Mrs. Silver's
mind, they've built up an intense, complicated relationship. Days can be ruined
by the tilt of Iris's head or an ill-timed cough.

In an odd way, Mrs. Silver reminds
me of some of the poor women I've worked with. It's that same sad inertia.
Getting up late, watching television all day, no good reason to look forward to
tomorrow. From the way she keeps rubbing her nose, I have to wonder whether she
isn't doing as much cocaine as some of my old clients. Of course, she can
afford to languish in much more pleasant surroundings than her counterparts on
public assistance.

"And now, Richard is trying to
turn Leonard against me," she's saying about their son as she finishes her
Sprite and fixes herself a vodka tonic. "It's a terrible strain on a boy
his age..."

I start to say something about
leaving again, but she's already ruminating obsessively about another sordid
point in her divorce proceedings.

"I knew Richard was running
around even then," she drones on, lighting a cigarette and letting the ash
fall down the front of her robe. "And he always had those shady business
deals, like the ones he has now..."

Something about the offhanded way
she says this catches my attention. "What shady business?"

"Well, like the money
laundering," she says, clearly not as interested in that subject as in
Richard's philandering. "He always liked blondes..."

"Wait a second," I say to
her. "Are you telling me you think your husband's involved in money
laundering?"

She looks offended. "Of
course," she says, throwing back her shoulders and pushing out her chest.
"I can prove it too." She walks off on swaying hips and disappears
into another room.

This whole thing sounds like a
crock and I'm anxious to get this afternoon over with so I can go home and feel
anxious about Andrea not calling me. And Darryl King running around. Finally,
Mrs. Silver comes out of the bathroom. She seems to be in a much better mood
now, like she just got high or something. The high heels are gone, and she's
put on a blouse with a floral design and a dark skirt that looks just a little
tight on her. I notice a lipstick smear across her front teeth.

"Hi, handsome," she says
in a loud party girl voice. "I have something special for you..."

She shows me two large shoe boxes
she's been holding behind her back. She offers them to me, but when I reach for
them, she backs away flirtatiously. She sashays across the carpet in her
black-stockinged feet, singing "Put the Blame on Mame" again.

"What's in the shoe boxes,
Mrs. Silver?"

"Gloria to you, big boy."

"Okay," I say.
"What've you got in those shoe boxes, Gloria?"

She's on her knees on the other side
of the room, opening a black oak cabinet and turning on some electronic
equipment. There's a soft hiss from hidden speakers and then a steady wallop of
drums playing in four/four time. Gloria is on her feet, dancing with a shoe box
in either hand.

"Got to go disco!" she
cries out as the song begins.

It's a shopworn old Bee Gees tune I
haven't heard since Saturday Night Fever came out. She sings along in a silly
falsetto and does twirls around the carpet. She's really getting down and
getting funky, but who am I to criticize? It's a tough job, but somebody has to
be nostalgic for the 1970s.

"C'mon, D-A-N-C-E!" she
shouts. "Are you gay or something?"

"No."

"I've slept with gay
guys," she says with not entirely sensible confidence.

As the song ends, I manage to get
one of the shoe boxes out of her hands. What's inside is like a bag person's
treasure trove. Old, torn-up receipts, inky credit card carbons, and
photocopied bank statements from accounts in the Cayman Islands. "All this
is supposed to have something to do with money laundering?" I say.

"I started making copies of
everything back in the seventies, when Richard was in the nightclub
business," she explains, standing behind me and breathing on my neck.
"Richard even put some of the accounts in my name. I just thought it might
come in useful one day."

I don't know about that. It just
seems to be an incoherent blizzard of old documents to me, most of them with
the name Goldman Resources, not Richard Silver, "Why didn't you use any of
this in your divorce case?" I say, giving her the shoe box back and
putting my hands in my windbreaker's pockets.

"My lawyer wouldn't enter it
as evidence," she says, following me around the room. "He said it was
too hard to follow. Can you imagine? I only found out later that Richard paid
him off too. On the first day, he told the judge..."

She starts to drown me with more
obscure details about her divorce but I hold up my hand. "Wait a
second," I say. "I looked at those papers just now and I don't think
I could follow them either."

"But you didn't even
try," she says, flopping down on the sofa and pulling out some of the
documents. "It's all right here."

I have had enough of this insanity
for one day. It's time to go home and get drunk. "You know, even if I take
the information you have here, it's probably not going to get you a big divorce
settlement or anything," I say. "It'll just mean giving your
ex-husband a tremendous pain in the ass."

She sits right up and her eyes
brighten, like this is the happiest moment of her week. "Do you think
so?" she says. "Do you really think so?"

On the nineteenth night in a row
with a temperature of ninety degrees or more, a dozen New York City police
officers gathered in the plaza outside an East 116th Street apartment house.

One of them, Detective Sergeant Bob
McCullough, carried a warrant for Darryl King's arrest for the murder of Pops
Osborn and his bodyguard. It had been a long day. Sweat began to seep through
the armpits of his yellow T-shirt as he looked in the file and saw a note from
Darryl's probation officer, Steven Baum. He described King as
"psychotic" and said "he scares me." McCullough smiled to
himself, thinking it did not take much to scare these social worker types. He
wondered why this Baum thought he had enough psychological training to call
somebody psychotic. The guy sounded like a know-it-all on the phone. Maybe it
was worth writing a piece about the proper role of probation officers in police
work.

As eleven o'clock came and went,
Emergency Service Unit officers got out of their truck parked near the
courtyard.

"Listen, we're not gonna have
any problem with this thing," Lieutentant Roger Keefer told McCullough.
"We're all set... We know about this guy. We just knock on the front door,
the guy will come running out one of the side entrances and we'll grab him. Okay?"

Just before eleven-thirty,
McCullough entered the building, accompanied by Lieutenant Keefer and Officer
Jenkins from his precinct and Officers Morales and Esposito from the Emergency
Service Unit. During the slow elevator ride up to the second floor, Lieutenant
Keefer discussed the upcoming election, Officer Morales's physical
attractiveness, and the general sorry state of the world. Detective Sergeant
McCullough realized Keefer was drunk just before the elevator stopped and the
door opened.

Later McCullough would blame
himself for not moving more quickly to stop Keefer from running down the dimly
lit corridor to 2C, where Eddie Johnson, the informant, said King often stayed
with his girlfriend, Alisha. Keefer knocked on the door twice and then pushed
it open. McCullough and the others followed him through the front door. The
apartment's living room was now empty, but someone had obviously been there
moments before. A quart bottle of Olde English "800" beer was lying
sideways, spilling its contents into the beige carpet. An open pack of Marlboro
Lights rested on the slipcovered arm of the couch. A crack pipe was next to it.
The Honeymooners played on the enormous television with a fracture in the
middle of the screen.

"Come on out, Darryl,"
Keefer shouted. "I know you're here."

A minute seemed to pass. The other
officers spread out around the room and edged toward the doorway that appeared
to lead to a back bedroom. Their walkie-talkies bleated. On the television
screen Jackie Gleason patted his stomach anxiously and chanted, "Homina,
homina, homina," as though it were a mantra.

A little girl emerged from the back
bedroom and stood in the doorway. She wore fuzzy blue pajamas with feet and her
hair was in pigtails. Her eyes were glazed and watery and her lower lip
trembled. She looked as if she'd just seen a monster.

"Come here, sweetheart,"
said Officer Lucy Morales of the Emergency Service Unit, reaching out to the
little girl with both arms. "Everything's going to be all right."

"I have one at home her
age," Keefer said to McCullough.

Since they were all facing the back
bedroom, they did not notice that Darryl was actually standing right behind
them in the front doorway. He aimed his 9 mm Browning automatic and squeezed
the trigger. There was a loud pop and Keefer fell over sideways with a geyser
of purplish-red blood spurting from the back of his neck.

The other cops spun around fast,
but Darryl had backed out into the hall. While Keefer lay on the carpet making
low groaning sounds, a hand reached out from the bedroom doorway and pulled the
little girl back inside. McCullough asked Officer Philip Jenkins to look after
Keefer's injuries and call for backup. Then the detective sergeant told Officer
Esposito to give him cover so he could peer out into the hallway and maybe take
a shot at Darryl. But before any of them could move, Darryl's 9 mm peeked in
through the front door again and fired four times.

All four missed, but Darryl was not
about to bring himself out into the open, McCullough realized. He was just
pointing the gun around the doorway and firing randomly into the apartment,
without showing himself. His invisibility made him even more frightening. He
was like a disembodied, irresistible force.

Then there was an abrupt, eerie
silence. Ninety seconds passed. It was as though Darryl had evaporated. A
deodorant commercial played on the TV. McCullough crawled slowly across the
damp carpet toward the front door. He hesitated for a moment and then took a quick
peek down the hall. There was no sign of Darryl. Officer Marty Esposito was
beside him now in the doorway, holding a 12-gauge shotgun. McCullough wondered
what made Emergency Service officers more qualified to use such weapons than
regular cops. He heard a door slam at the north end of the hallway and he
leaned out of the doorway a little farther so he could get a good look.

Without warning, two more rounds
from Darryl King's gun rocketed past his head and pierced the grayish cinder
block wall a few inches behind him. It was like a cannon had gone off right
next to his ear. For a few seconds, he was deaf. The shots seemed to be coming
from the south end of the hall, but McCullough still couldn't see where Darryl
was standing.

Officer Morales stepped out of the
apartment with her gun drawn. Before McCullough could tell her to look out, a
third and fourth shot from Darryl's end of the hallway spun her around and
dropped her to her knees. Morales cried out and clutched her bleeding right
hand. Her .38 was on the floor now. As Esposito moved to help her, McCullough
saw something that looked like Darryl's head peering out of a doorway at the
south end of the hall. McCullough stepped toward the middle of the hall,
assumed the shooter's position with his .38, and fired. It was a difficult
angle, and he recognized the low whistling noise he heard next as the sound of
a bullet's ricochet. He ducked and backed up against the wall. Darryl fired
back and McCullough turned and saw Officer Esposito sway back on his heels and
melt to the hallway floor in a heap, like the Wicked Witch of the West. The
shotgun fell from his hands and blood spurted from his abdomen, just below his
bullet-proof vest.

In a panic, McCullough fired two
more shots down at Darryl's end of the hall. Again, there was no response. Once
more, the long silence started. "Let's get the fuck out of here!"
McCullough screamed at no one in particular.

Officer Morales was not hurt too
badly and she was able to give McCullough one hand's help in dragging Esposito
some thirty yards toward the north end of the hallway where the elevator was.
The stairway door was too far to go. They fell down several times trying to
pull the body along. Esposito's wound was not quite as bad as McCullough first
thought, but he was going to need immediate attention.

While he was examining the
injuries, McCullough heard footsteps and scampering coming toward their end of
the hall. But when he looked up again, he still did not see Darryl, though he
knew he was watching them. McCullough rang the elevator bell a dozen times in a
row.

The wait seemed like hours. There
was still no sign of backup. McCullough pleaded for help into his
walkie-talkie. Morales and Esposito were both bleeding and gasping. The
elevator was groaning and moving as slowly as an old elephant waking up. Just
as it arrived, McCullough saw Darryl pointing a 12-gauge shotgun from a doorway
some twenty feet up the hall. The shotgun wavered for a second and aimed at the
cops. Darryl fired another blast over their heads.

As he ducked once more, McCullough
heard a .38-caliber service revolver being cocked and suddenly realized that
Darryl was picking up each officer's weapon as it was dropped. His arsenal was
growing as he advanced on the cops. McCullough looked down and saw to his
horror that his own gun was missing. It must've slipped out of his holster
while he was dragging Esposito along the floor.

McCullough pulled the elevator's
outside metal door open. He rolled into the car with Morales and Esposito
tumbling in after him. They were all breathing hard as the door paused on its
hinge and slowly began to close. Watching it was agony.

McCullough heard the clip-clop of
sneakers coming down the hall quickly toward the elevator. The first door
finally closed, but the second sliding door had not budged and the elevator did
not move. Slumped in the corner, McCullough looked up at the porthole window in
the first door. Through the wire-screen squares in the glass, he saw Darryl
King's face. Darryl glowered at him. He looked just like his picture in the
file, only meaner. Then as suddenly as it appeared, his face was gone from the
window.

McCullough closed his eyes and
sighed as the sliding door finally began to close. A tremendous shotgun blast
ripped through the first door. Double-aught pellets ricocheted and clattered
through the car. Two rounds from a .38-caliber service revolver followed.
McCullough felt a burning sensation up and down his leg. As the second door
slid into place and the elevator descended, McCullough checked to see how bad
his wound was. He'd been hit in the right leg with buckshot and splintered
wood. His pants were torn and bloody. His left leg seemed to have caught at
least part of the shell from the .38.

He was all right physically. But by
the time they'd reached the first floor, he was becoming dimly aware that he'd
been shot with his own gun.

There was a stone pathway along the
grassy knoll behind the building. Three young officers stood on its pavement,
talking to each other and turning the knobs on their walkie-talkies. Old sodium
vapor lights cast weak shadows around the plaza.

The shortest of the three cops was
holding forth about flyfishing on Long Island Sound. His partner, a skinny man
with a long nose and sunken eyes, flapped his shirt collar to cool his sweaty
chest. A third cop named Simmons smoothed his mustache and ignored the fisherman.

All three looked up when a rear
window on the second floor opened and a young man with close-cropped hair stuck
his head outside and stared straight ahead.

"Hey, man, you better get your
head back inside," said the cop named Simmons. "There's a wild man
running around with a lot of guns."

"Thanks," said Darryl
King.

He ducked his head back inside and
reloaded three of the five guns he was carrying. He leaned back out and began
firing the 9 mm and the .38. The cops scattered. The fly-fisherman and his
partner briefly took positions near some broken green benches and returned
fire. But when Darryl's shots came too close, they ran for cover.

The one named Simmons fell to the
pavement, yowling in pain with a bullet through the back of his right knee.
Darryl came down the fire escape quickly. He jumped from the last step and
fired one more shot at Simmons's prone body, missed, and then ran off into the night.

Over the next two hours, hundreds
of police officers swept through the neighborhood. They turned apartments
upside down, questioned possible informants, and watched street corners, but
they could not find Darryl. The police commissioner assigned several units to
keep up the search for the next few days or however long it took to catch him.

Just after 3:30 in the morning,
Darryl arrived at the apartment where his sister, Joanna Coleman, was staying.

Joanna and her boyfriend, Winston, were
watching a video-cassette of the film Escape from New York. Their two small
children, LaToya and Howard, were running around naked and firing Lazer Tag
guns at each other.

When LaToya saw her uncle Darryl
with his bloodshot eyes and sweaty T-shirt, she ran at him with open arms and
hugged him around the knees. "I was ascared for you," she said.

"They ain't got me yet."

Instead of patting her head, Darryl
looked around the place in a daze. Three men and two women were smoking crack
and having sex in one of the back bedrooms. Ida Montgomery, a tiny sixty-six-year-old
woman, tried to sleep on a cot in what used to be the kitchen. Her
crack-addicted daughter gave use of the apartment to her dealer, Joanna
Coleman, after she fell behind on payments.

Darryl walked over to the couch and
collapsed. He was exhausted from running so hard and being so scared. After a
minute, he realized nobody was paying attention to him anymore. He took
Detective Sergeant McCullough's gun out of his belt and laid it on a cushion. Its
chambers were empty now. He began to weep softly. His sister looked up from the
television and glared at him in disgust.

"What's the matter with you
now?" she asked. "Why you crying? Ain't you a man?"

"Nobody loves me," Darryl
King said.