The Intruder (12 page)

“I’ll have to get back to you about that,” says Jake, with a deferential look. “I’m a lawyer, you know.”

Philip throws up his hands as if he’s just touched a hot porcupine. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to suggest anything outta line. It just upsets me when I see the way our children have to grow up now.”

A Ford Explorer jeep pulls up at the West End Avenue stoplight. Hardcore hip-hop blasts from its speakers, rattling the windows and shaking the tailpipes.

An involuntary snarl forms on Philip’s lips. “What’d I tell you? They’re taking over. You can’t even walk down the street without having your ears assaulted. Makes me wonder why we fought a war overseas.”

The light changes. The jeep pulls away. The sound of sparrows singing fades in.

“You in Vietnam?” Philip raises his right hand, like he’s ready to give Jake a high five and bond with him at another level.

“Ah, I had a deferment,” Jake mumbles. “I was in school, you know.”

The hand hangs in the air, turns, and then goes back down to Philip’s side, as if it’s no big deal. Hey. Brooklyn is Brooklyn.

“Do me a favor, will you?” says Jake, changing the subject. “Let me know if you talk to anybody who saw what happened last night. I came out a little late. And my boy and his friend, I don’t know if they could pick the guy out of a lineup.”

“I’ll give you a holler if I hear anything,” says Philip. “By the way, you need a hand replacing that glass in your door?”

“How much do you charge?”

“It’s on the house.” Philip lifts his shoulders and drops them. “Hey. You’re from the old neighborhood. You got any other problems?”

“Well we may be having some trouble with our chimney. I noticed soot coming out of the fireplace the other day.”

“That could be serious.” Philip bites his top lip and cocks his head to the left. “You oughta let me have a look at it.”

“You do chimney work too?”

“I do everything.”

Jake opens his hands. “Whenever you have time.”

“You got it, buddy.” Philip starts to walk down the steps.

Jake picks up his broom again. The stoop is mostly clean, except for five or six fragments that glint like mica. He thinks about Vietnam and wonders how he would have done in combat. There’s always been a little stab of guilt about not going. Just as he starts to wince, Philip Cardi calls out to him from the bottom of the steps.

“Mr. Schiff,” he says. “Think about what I told you. About having a talk with the guy. I’d go with you. Whoever he is.”

“I’ll think about it.” Jake lifts his broom. “Whoever he is.” Though even in the dim light, Jake is almost sure he recognized John G.

“I’m not an educated man like you are,” Philip says, “but I remember something I heard in high school. I think it was from an English philosopher. He said all that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”

“Okay.”

“So don’t do nothing.”

15

The sergeant has hair the color of Orange Crush and a complexion like a strawberry.

“I want to follow up on a complaint,” Jake says.

“Yeah, yeah.” The desk sergeant, who is named Lategano, moves some papers and puts his head down, so he’s looking up at Jake from the tops of his eyes. “What’s
your
problem?”

“I made a call to the precinct last night because my son and his friend got attacked. I’m still waiting to hear back from someone about investigating.”

The sergeant rolls up his mouth in boredom as Jake goes over the details of the incident one more time.

“So you called in a report last night?” the sergeant interrupts, drumming his fingers on a beat-up math textbook near his phone.

“Yes, that’s what I just said.”

“So what do you want us to do now? It’s been reported.”

Jake feels himself starting to flush. He’s a lawyer. He ought to know his way around the system better than other people. He’s taken cops like this Lategano apart on the witness stand a thousand times. So why is the sergeant talking to him as if he’s mildly retarded?

“I just want to see if anything is being done,” Jake says. “Talk to people in the neighborhood. Maybe somebody saw something and can help make a positive I.D.”

The sergeant picks his left ear like he’s never heard anything so stupid in his life. With great reluctance, he writes down Jake’s criminal complaint number and picks up a telephone receiver, which suddenly seems to weigh at least seventy-five pounds.

“Yeah, gimme eight-three-eight-nine,” he mumbles into the phone. He flicks his eyes over at Jake. “You got a minute, right?”

He turns away without waiting for an answer.

Jake studies the community policing charts and the robbery beat maps on the green tiled walls. Again, he’s reminded that a precinct is not a place to relax or take your station in life for granted. A bull-necked detective wearing a crewcut and a yellow polo shirt leads a young black kid in a Bart Simpson T-shirt and handcuffs through the room. The kid is looking around, a little scared and a little curious. A newcomer to the system, Jake thinks. Over the next few years, he’ll learn to swagger and lie that he likes being in jail.

Sergeant Lategano is still muttering into the phone and letting his eyes wander over the book on his desk.

“Yeah . . . yeah . . . Really?” He looks over at Jake with new interest. “I didn’t know that.”

Jake finds himself sitting up straight. As if he’s going to impress this timeserver.

“What, were you falling asleep in class? The answer’s the Pytha-gorian theorem,” the sergeant says into the phone, looking down at the math textbook. “Do your own homework from now on. Good-bye.”

He hangs up abruptly and gives Jake a bitter look. “Night school,” he says. “So the report says this might have been one of your wife’s patients who was bothering your kid. Is that right?”

“We think so.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” the sergeant says.

“What’re you talking about? A guy comes at my son with a razor and you’re not going to do anything about it?”

“It’s simple harrassment,” the sergeant explains. “That’s only a violation. The lowest form of criminal complaint. It’d barely be worth giving the guy a desk appearance ticket if we could find him.”

“What about the razor?” Jake says. “That should raise it to menacing. That’s a misdemeanor.”

“What’re you, a lawyer or something?”

“Yeah,” says Jake reluctantly, knowing his chances of getting any cooperation have just dropped off sharply.

“So the report we have says it was a box cutter. You ought to know that isn’t classified as one of the eight deadly weapons.”

“So what? He’s still waving it around like a weapon.”

“Did he ask your son for money?”

“No.”

“Did he cut him?”

“No.”

“So it’s not robbery and it’s not assault and battery.” The sergeant leans back with his legs crossed and his pant cuff riding up his pale white calf. Case closed. “If this were your client, Counselor, and we were talking about arresting him, you’d be squealing like a stuck pig.”

Jake works the muscles in his jaw, knowing it’s true. “What about disorderly conduct?”

“For what?” the sergeant asks. “Taking a leak in the street? Come on. We’d have to lock up half the Borough Command every Saturday night.”

“You mean to tell me this guy can stand outside our home threatening our child, and you’re not going to do anything about it?”

The look of winter crosses the sergeant’s face, even as the window fans battle the humidity of August.

“Mr. Schiff, you’ve studied the Constitution, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Well, so now I’m going to Fordham at night and I’m studying it—because you gotta have a degree or an African mother in this department now—and you know what I figured out?” The sergeant rocks back and folds his hands on top of his stomach. “That the laws were made by a bunch of lawyers trying to protect their own property. And then when they stole enough property, they began feeling guilty and started granting rights to the so-called disadvantaged. Which left it to your working stiffs in the
militias and the police departments to keep those mopes in their place, so they wouldn’t rise up and try to reclaim some of those lawyers’ property. So you know what I think you ought to do, Mr. Schiff? I think you oughta get together with some of your lawyer friends and some of your wife’s psychiatrist friends and put the law back the way it was. Make it less confusing for everybody.”

“Oh for crying out loud!” Jake erupts. “I’m supposed to wait around until this guy hurts someone? Jesus. What would you do if this was happening to you?”

“Hey.” The sergeant draws back his head and a roll of stubbly fat appears under his chin. “I live out in Rockland County. I don’t have to worry about this shit.”

16

Stay high ‘til you die. Die ‘til you’re high. High ‘til you die.

Life without the crack buzz has become almost intolerable to John G. When he’d first hit the street, he’d promised himself he wouldn’t mug anybody to support his habit. But the money from collecting cans and panhandling just isn’t enough anymore. He needs a massive infusion.

He’s scared out of his mind as he walks up Broadway at night looking for a victim. His eye sockets feel raw and his throat is dry. It’s been years since he even thought about doing crime and he’s not sure if he’s up to any kind of confrontation. Plus, there’s still a small voice in the back of his mind telling him this is wrong, that everything he’s doing is wrong, and he ought to go back to that nice lady and ask for help.

The street is full of distractions. Taxi headlights. Models flashing their tits on magazine covers at the newsstands. Steam rising from a hole in the road. He can’t screen any of it out.

Finally, while he’s waiting for a light to change on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street, he turns and sees a man in black clothing closing the front door of a hulking gray building. He moves up behind him quickly and closes his right hand around the box cutter in his pocket.

That mental voice is still trying to warn him off, telling him it’s not too late. But the part of him that wants to get high is
stronger, and he reaches up and wraps his arm around the victim’s throat.

“Give it up,” he says.

“The wallet’s in my left pocket,” the vie says, bending back, not struggling. “Just take it.”

John G. sticks his hand in, pulls out the wallet and a set of rosary beads.

“What the fuck’s this?”

“I’m a priest.”

The victim turns around and the white square in his collar hits John G. right between the eyes.

“Oh fuck!” John looks up and sees they’re on the steps of a Roman Catholic church.

“Is something the matter?” the priest asks, as if he’s accustomed to dealing with a more professional class of mugger.

“Oh shit!” John G. drops the beads and the box cutter. “God fucking damn it. I’m so fucking sorry, Father.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, really. I’m all fucked up. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

He scoops up the beads and hands them back to the priest. The box cutter goes back in his pocket. His brain frequencies are scrambling. All of a sudden, he’s not sure what to do with his hands or where to put his eyes. And he’s not even that high at the moment.

“You want to come in awhile?” asks the priest, seeing his confusion. “We could talk.”

He looks a little like Father Drobney from Aunt Rose’s parish up in the Bronx. He has the same kind of dark tonsure of hair around a bald pate and a similar moon-pale face. John G.’s body sways as if it’s ready to follow him into the church, but his feet stay anchored to the sidewalk.

“I don’t know what I could say to you, Father. I’m so mixed up. It’s been about twenty years since my last confession.”

“That’s okay.”

The priest goes fishing into his other pocket for keys. But John G. isn’t moving. He jiggles in place, looking at the traffic lights across the street and the stars overhead.

“Is there something you want to tell me out here?” says the priest, sensing resistance.

“I’m in turmoil, Father. I can’t control myself. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt somebody.”

“I see.” The priest visibly tenses and three ridges appear on his forehead like steps to the top of his skull. “And how are you going to do that?”

“There’s these people, Father.” The jiggling becomes more frantic and he starts grinding his teeth again. “They live like right around the corner from here.”

“And they’re the ones you think you’re going to hurt?”

“I can’t leave them alone. You know? There’s just something about them. I have these feelings for the lady in the family. You know what I’m saying?”

The priest wipes his brow with a handkerchief. “Feelings.”

“Yeah, I have these feelings because she’s just like my wife. I’m very attracted to her.”

“I see.” The priest moves his mouth around, trying to accommodate John and appear empathetic.

“So now she’s with this other guy and it’s like he has the life I was supposed to have. See? He even has a kid like I used to. It’s like he stole my life by moving the molecules around. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Well it sounds a little unusual,” the priest says, trying to sound reasonable about it.

“Yeah, I know it!” John stomps his right foot. “I know it! And I know what I’m doing’s wrong, but I can’t help myself. There’s this part of me that says I have to get rid of this guy she’s with before the molecules can go back in the right place and I can get back what I used to have.”

“I think you have to fight that impulse. Have you sought counseling?”

“I’ve sought everything!” John G. says loudly, looking furtively from side to side. “I been trying to work it out with science! I been trying to work it out with God. And I’m not getting any answers!”

“Well, what’s the question?” The priest fingers his beads.

“The question is why would God give me everything and then
take it all away? Why would he kill my daughter and end my marriage? I mean, I start off telling myself it’s all my fault. I mean, I was standing there when it happened. I could have saved her. But then it’s too much. I fuckin’ trip out. So then I get high and all hell breaks loose.”