Invisible Boy (23 page)

Y
ou know Kyle West?” asked Bost.

“Jesus,” I said. “What’s he doing
here
? I mean, he used to talk about going to law school, but this is ridiculous. What is he, working for Hetzler?”

“Kyle’s an ADA,” said Bost.

“With you guys?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Thank God,” I said. “It would’ve been way too weird if it turned out he was working for Teddy’s mother.”

Bost looked at Skwarecki. “He’s been a prosecutor in Special Victims for what, two years now?”

“Just about,” said Skwarecki.

“What’s Special Victims?” I asked.

“Sex crimes,” said Bost. “He’s done a lot of good work, especially with kids.”

“Our little Kyle?” I said.

“Good people,” said Skwarecki. “
Seriously
good people.”

“Always was,” I said. “Haven’t seen him since college. And let me tell you, me and Kyle and our buddy Ellis? We used to
drink
.”

Skwarecki slid around to the edge of the booth and stood up. “So let’s drag his ass over, already.”

I watched Skwarecki walk across the room. Kyle looked up at her with a big smile on his face, and then she pointed over to
our table. He saw me and slapped a hand over his heart, grinning even wider as he feigned cardiac trauma. He said something
to Hetzler and then bounced up out of his seat.

“Maddie Dare! What the hell brings you to fashionable Queens?” He slid in beside me and gave me a huge hug.

“We’re getting her prepped for the grand jury,” said Bost.

“Sweetheart,” he said, “tell me everything!”

So I did.

“And now you have to tell
me
why you’re yakking it up with that guy Hetzler,” I said.

“The jury just came back on a case of mine,” said Kyle. “I kicked Marty’s ass—client got twenty-five to life.”

“
Awesome,
” I said.

“This was Garcia?” asked Skwarecki.

Kyle nodded, turning to me. “Maddie, the most adorable little girl, and so brave on the stand—I can’t even tell you.”

“The father wouldn’t cop to it?” asked Skwarecki.

“Total dirtbag,” said Kyle. “He dragged it out and dragged it out until he’d made her testify.”

Skwarecki shook her head slowly. “You had him admitting to

everything
. Right off the bat.”

“On video, no less,” said Kyle. “Bad enough, what he’d already put her through.”

He shook his head. “Five
years
, Maddie. The most horrific abuse, and she’s only twelve now. Imagine?”

“But you got the guy?” I asked.

“
Nailed
him,” he said. “Marty didn’t have a prayer.”

I invited Kyle to dinner on Sixteenth Street that night, since he’d offered to drive me back to the city—or at least what
he and I called “the city.” Skwarecki would’ve no doubt given us a ton of shit for making any such distinction between Queens
and Manhattan.

As Kyle slowed to make the turn onto our block in the dusky light, I saw a fat unconscious guy leaned up against a parking-sign

pole. He was canted forward from the waist, belly mashed against thighs, knuckles nearly grazing the sidewalk, head hanging
lower than

his ass.

Actually, it was his ass I noticed first. The guy’s pants were shoved down around his knees, baring a floating visual non
sequitur of giant beige harvest-moon butt cheeks.

“Did the Thanksgiving parade start early,” asked Kyle, “or did we just drive by an enormous naked ass?”

“An enormous naked homeless ass. There was a paper cup by his foot with dollar bills sticking out the top. Kind of amazing
it hasn’t been stolen.”

“I’ll be sure to mention that next time anyone gives me shit about how Dinkins hasn’t brought crime rates down.”

Kyle clicked on his hazard lights and double-parked behind a guy loading suitcases into the back of a station wagon.

“How bad are they?” I asked.

“Crime rates?”

“You’re on the front lines. Are things getting worse, or has it always been this bad?”

The station wagon pulled out and Kyle maneuvered into its spot.

“It started out bad,” he said, pulling up the emergency brake, “and it’s been getting worse for thirty years.”

We got out of his car and headed into the courtyard of One-Thirty-Five.

I let us into the vestibule and stuck my key in the inner door’s lock. “You know, when I first came east for school—in seventy-eight,
seventy-nine—there weren’t homeless people everywhere. There were, like, occasional bums, you know? But even in Grand Central
there were only bag ladies—crazy old women in ratty fur coats. We could still use the bathrooms there. You didn’t see people
begging everywhere, passed out on the sidewalks, all of that.”

“You didn’t see giant asses on every street corner,” said Kyle.

“Was it just Reagan, or what?”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“I read some old essay about living in Manhattan, E. B. White or something,” I said as we started up the stairs. “And he was
talking about how they had wicker seats on the subways. Fucking wicker, can you imagine? But then you read about gangs in
Five Points, back in the day—people getting garroted in hansom cabs, race riots in Astor Place a hundred years ago—and I just
wonder if it’s all because there are too many people smashed in together here. If it’s always been this ugly.”

We walked into the apartment and I turned on the hallway’s light. No one else was home yet.

“The homeless stuff was partly Reagan and partly Koch,” said Kyle. “Reagan cut federal funding right and left, but it was
Koch’s decision to shut down mental wards around the city. You’d see people walking down the street still wearing their hospital
ID bracelets. And then a lot of SROs shut down—hundreds of hotels where you used to be able to get a cheap room by the week.”

“Want a beer?” I asked, stepping into the kitchen.

“Sure.”

I opened the fridge and grabbed two Rolling Rocks. “And the actual crime stats?”

“Worse. Like I said, a thirty-year upswing. But that’s complicated, too.”

I twisted off the beer caps and handed him a bottle. “So is it about drugs? I mean, maybe this is really stupid, but I always
think of
The French Connection
and then that scene in
The Godfather
where they discuss the Mafia getting serious about heroin—so that’s the seventies.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “And God knows you and I were up close and personal with the influx of coke in the eighties.”

“No shit. I watched that wave build from Studio Fifty-four on up through the advent of freebasing, at which point I drew the
line.”

“So to speak,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said, and we clinked our beers together. “Let’s go grab the sofa before everyone else gets home.”

The whole gang was in residence, still talking about drugs and crime over a fine dinner of Szechuan.

“Swear to God,” said Sue, spearing a pot-sticker. “It was a whole year before I realized ‘bodega’ wasn’t Spanish for ‘crime
scene.’ ”

“Crack made everything worse,” I said.

“It’s been fucking horrible here,” said Kyle.

“Not just here,” I said, thinking of Syracuse.

“Thank God for the War on Drugs, right?” said Pagan. “Because
that’s
been fucking brilliant.”

“Fucking morons,” I said. “Nancy-goddamn-Reagan-‘Just Say No’ Buttheads.”

“Your tax dollars at work,” said Sue.

I nodded. “Partnership for a fucking Drug-Free America. It’s all just the same old shit.”

“Same as what?” asked Kyle.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like the crap brochures they used to have lying around in the back of my middle-school library back
in California? All this
Reefer Madness
‘It leads to harder stuff!’ scare-tactic crap, mixed in with bullshit like ‘Here are some names that criminals use for Marihuana’—spelled
with an ‘h,’ mind you—”

“Like ‘tea’ and ‘maryjane,’ ” said Kyle.

“Exactly. I mean, slang last current when used by jazz musicians in nineteen fifteen?” I said.

“We had those brochures too,” he said.

“And now we just have the fried-egg TV ads with ‘This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs,’ ” said Pagan. “It’s just
flailing. A flailure.”

Sue scooped some dry-fried string beans onto her bowl of rice. “Thank you, George Bush.”

“Look, the only thing the War on Drugs has done is made it harder to buy weed,” said Pagan.

I added, “And then made coke tacky and ubiquitous, before fueling the innovation of crack.”

“It’s still just coke,” said Sue. “It’s just cut less and doled out in cheaper portions.”

Kyle shook his head. “Except the mandatory minimum sentence is different for crack versus powder. Which is not a good thing.”

“Why?” asked Pagan.

“Because powder is suburban and crack is urban,” said Kyle. “So you get poorer people doing a lot more jail time for a far
smaller quantity of the same drug, since nineteen eighty-six.”

“How much smaller?” she asked.

“They call it the hundred-to-one drug-quantity ratio. Five grams of crack gets you a mandatory five years in prison. And that’s
just for possession. You’d need to get busted with five-
hundred
grams of powder before you’d be looking at that same five years.”

“And five grams of powder?” I asked.

“Misdemeanor,” he said. “One year, max.”

“Like
that’s
gonna help,” said Pagan. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I think crack is God’s gift to humanity, guaranteed to
build strong bodies in twelve ways and get the crabgrass out of your lawn, but even so—”

“Supply-side economics,” I said. “Only thing you can do is legalize everything. Make it bonded, like bourbon. Generate some
tax revenue.”

“Why the hell not?” asked Pagan. “When the drinking age was twenty-one in California, we could get anything illegal we wanted,
even in middle school—mushrooms, coke, LSD, mescaline, sinsemilla that’d knock you flat on your ass—but no booze.”

“I’m not sure Seagram’s wants the competition,” said Sue.

“Seagram’s already has the competition,” I said. “But maybe fewer people would die fighting over the profits and distribution.
Maybe it’s time to take Al Capone out of the equation across the board.”

“Madeline, there’s a lot more to it,” said Kyle. “It’s not that easy.”

“I know. But still—”

“It’s
not
. Look at the case you’re involved with, what happened to Teddy Underhill. What’s happened to this city, all the violence—it’s
not just strictly some offshoot of misguided prohibition.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But is there a higher rate of crack addiction than alcoholism in this country? And aren’t more kids
beaten to death by parents that’re just plain drunk?”

“Yes,” he said, “and the majority of drug-related homicides are dealer-on-dealer, not committed by users.”

“So what
do
we do?” I asked. “How do we protect children? Prohibition doesn’t work. What else is there?”

“I don’t know, Maddie,” he replied. “There’s nothing I can do about the big picture. I just try to make sure the bad guys
go down so they stop hurting kids.”

“One day at a time,” I said.

Sue looked at Kyle. “What’s going to happen with the people who killed the little boy Madeline found? Will you guys get
them
?”

“We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “I just hope it’s enough.”

“And it’s not the only case any of you guys are dealing with,” I said. “It’s not even officially yours at all. You must have
a ton of other things on your plate.”

“Today I’ve got a guy who burned his kid to death with an iron,” said Kyle. “I think Skwarecki caught the little girl left
in a Dumpster.”

The rest of us put our chopsticks down, our interest in dinner officially finished as we contemplated those images.

“Sorry,” he said, looking at our pale faces around the table.

“Thank you for what you do,” said Sue, raising her beer toward Kyle. “I couldn’t handle your job for five minutes. I really
couldn’t.”

We all joined her in toasting him.

“Nightmare,” said Pagan. “The whole thing is a fucking nightmare.”

Dean called at midnight, his time, just after I’d drifted off to sleep.

“ ’Lo?” I croaked.

“Hey, Bunny, I wake you up?”

“No problem.”

“It’s an hour earlier here, but I figured you’d be awake.” His voice was soft, a little drunk.

I checked out the clock-radio: quarter after one. “How’s Houston?”

“Flat and wide, with shitty Chinese food.”

“I can meet you at the airport, with sesame noodles.”

“Naked?”

“Not sure how that’d go over on the PATH train.”

He laughed. “Wear my trench coat.”

“You don’t
own
a trench coat.”

“My old coveralls, then.”

“In public? Dream on.”

“In private, then. Don’t bother with the airport.”

“You’re on.”

“In that case, I’ll spring for a taxi home.”

“I miss you,” I said.

“See you at eight. Don’t forget the noodles.”