New Jersey Noir (8 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“Yes, I understand. It’s
you
who doesn’t understand. You prove my point. Answer the questions, fill out the forms, toe tag the corpse, and shovel it under. Then on Sunday talk soul and spirit.” Miles paused and returned to his chair. He sat down heavily and spoke softly: “I’m sorry. Maybe I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe you’re right. Maybe any damn thing. It’s dawn and I feel like I came to work a week ago. I’m exhausted. Can I go home now?”
Cash turned back to the window. “Where are your guns?”
“The detectives took them. They gave me a receipt.” Miles produced the wrinkled paper and placed it on the table.
Cash glanced at it. “All right, put it away, hold onto it. You know procedure. You’ll be reassigned to a desk job until you’re cleared on the shooting. Tomorrow we’ll talk again and cross the T’s and dot the I’s. Then you’ll sit for your official interview. I’ll be there personally to monitor things.”
Miles stood up and began to leave the room.
“One more thing,” Cash said to the man’s back. “Stay home. Let Negron take you straight home and stay there. Don’t speak to anyone about the shooting, not even Negron. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Miles placed a hand on the doorknob and started out. Before leaving, he turned slowly and spoke softly: “Mr. Cash, I know what everybody thinks. I know what
you
think. Tonight, any other cop would have been assigned some lawyer right out of school. But because of my father, you showed up personally. And I’m sure you know how grateful he’ll be for that.”
Cash wore a neutral expression. “Yes,” he said.
“I need you to understand something, though. I want everybody to understand something. The last thing in the world my father wanted was for me to become a cop. He tried his best to change my mind, and when he couldn’t he tried to talk me out of working for Camden PD. But he couldn’t do that, either. There are some good people in Camden, Mr. Cash. They’re trying to make a life for themselves.”
For the first time since entering the room, a small, tired smile touched Miles’s face as he continued.
“I just wanted to help them do it. That’s all I ever wanted. The other cops, they hardly talk to me. Negron and Sanchez have me for a partner because they pissed off the duty sergeant. But they’ve got me all wrong.”
He turned back to the door, speaking as he left the room.
“I was just trying to help.”
When Miles was gone, Cash turned to the window behind him, his cold, gray eyes studying the early-morning light as it began to nudge against the slowly dying night sky.
He stood there alone for quite some time. He wondered why Negron, from his position of cover behind the porch, had not fired.
He wondered why Sanchez had not fired.
And as the Camden sky grew brighter, he wondered about organs and brains, nerves and enzymes, anatomy and souls.
A
new day was coming to Newark.
The boy had actually got himself elected mayor.
Miss Crawford was satisfied with this. She knew him now for some years, not just seen him on the TV, mind you, but she knew him. Not because she was his people. His people were from Harrington Park, and Miss Crawford had watched him sideways like lots of folks at the old Brick Towers back when he was a councilman and he first moved in. The boy himself went to Yale and Stanford and places like that, and besides he had those green-blue eyes. Wasn’t no other politician she could remember ever set foot in Brick Towers, and this baby-face councilman was going to live there? Something had to be up, no question. But the councilman was always polite, he learned her name right fast, and if something was going on she never knew what it was. He walked up the stairs like the rest of them when the elevator was out and one time she saw him bringing groceries for old Mrs. Green next door to him. Miss Crawford herself, she lived on the second floor, so it wasn’t no thing, but she couldn’t help noticing that since he moved in, it wasn’t like the elevator went out less often but it got fixed when it did. The lightbulbs in the halls got replaced when they burned out too, not six months later.
So when the boy announced for mayor, that first time, she thought, Well all right. None of that with the elevator and the lightbulbs happened all the years that other boy was mayor, did it? Strictly, that one wasn’t no boy, excepting that Miss Crawford was so far past her threescore and ten that she could call anyone a boy she liked to, thank you very much. That other one, he was a grown man with expensive suits and a gap in his teeth and he should have known better. Oh, he spoke beautiful. If he’d took to preaching instead of politics he’d have had any pulpit he wanted and Miss Crawford just knew he could’ve sold the Lord to the Devil himself. That was the trouble with him right there. In the boy’s first campaign the gap-toothed mayor kept telling everybody who’d listen,
Newark’s not for sale
, but he was the one buying and selling. He was everyone’s friend and everyone’s favorite uncle, he threw ice-cream socials and all, and he got big glass buildings built downtown. But here in the Central Ward, were the schools safe? Did anyone think to fix the sidewalk cracks, where poor Leteesha Monroe broke her leg? Did the police run off the drug dealers from the playgrounds? Course not. They stopped their patrol cars and called the dealers over, but sure as God made little apples, that was to get their share of the take. Miss Crawford might be eighty-eight, she might be five feet tall and weigh less than a sack of flour, but she knew what time it was. Maybe the boy would be as bad when he got elected, but he couldn’t be no worse. And the elevator was running. So she voted for him, and he lost, but then he won the next time, which was now.
So it was a new day in Newark.
Now, that didn’t mean the old day was gone away. Things took time, Miss Crawford knew that. Those gangs peddling their poison had cleared out from the schoolyards, and that impressed Miss Crawford. The new mayor promised that and he delivered it. But those same no-account punks sneered from the streetcorners now, and the police cars still rolled up and rolled away. That would be the hardest part of the new mayor’s job, to Miss Crawford’s mind: straightening out the police. He could hire all the new chiefs he liked, and the new chiefs could take up the rotten apples when they found them, and she’d seen that start to go on already. It was just, there were so many of them. Which wasn’t no way saying Newark didn’t have police you could trust. It surely did, and more every day.
That nice girl who moved in upstairs from Miss Crawford in January, she was a new officer, just out of the academy. She was from Weequahic Park over in the South Ward, but the police assigned her to the 4th precinct and so she moved here. “Like the mayor,” she told Miss Crawford in her kitchen as they got acquainted, very neighborly. She poured Miss Crawford coffee and said, “You know, when he was a councilman he represented the Central Ward so he wanted to live here. In the old Brick Towers, you remember that place? He inspired me.”
Well, there you go, Miss Crawford thought. Do right and you never know how far it’ll spread. She told the girl officer—Patrol Officer Joyce was her name, Aleksandra Joyce—about how she used to live in Brick Towers too, with the councilman before he was mayor, about him carrying groceries and walking the stairs.
Officer Joyce’s face gleamed. “I knew he was like that, I knew it. And I thought the old mayor taking down Brick Towers right after that first election, that was just spite.”
“Oh, child, it surely was.”
“Well, I’m glad anyway,” the girl had said impulsively. “If there was still Brick Towers, you would never have moved here, Miss Crawford, and then we wouldn’t be friends.”
That made Miss Crawford feel all warm, and she sat in Officer Joyce’s kitchen more times than that. The girl needed friends too, you could tell that when she talked. She shrugged it off, acting all tough police, but Miss Crawford didn’t get to be this old for nothing.
“It’s always like this for new officers, I guess,” the girl told her. “Especially women.”
“Life’s hard on women everywhere,” said Miss Crawford.
“You got that right.”
Another time: “It’s like a club. The older cops, they’ve been in this club a long time, and they don’t necessarily welcome new members.”
Miss Crawford had nodded at that, and just said, “These things take time.” Officer Joyce smiled, but Miss Crawford felt troubled in her mind. Here was a good girl and an honest officer, trying to do right, and the same old, same old was holding her back. Right here on these blocks of the Central Ward, Robbie down at the grocery still had police taking coffee and donuts in the morning, bags of potato chips and pretzels too, then just waving goodbye as they strolled past the register. The Shaw twins at the garage still changed the oil in officers’ private cars for nothing, and shopkeepers all up and down the streets still handed over contributions to the Widows and Orphans Fund. In cash.
All that was down at least some to the people who lived here, as much as the bad police, and Miss Crawford went and scolded Robbie or one of the Shaw boys from time to time, but what were they going to do? Chances were already poor they’d get police protection if they needed it, but they’d be poorer if they didn’t play along, and everyone knew it.
Yes, things took time, Miss Crawford thought as she trundled her grocery cart along, but sometimes, like now, she wished the time had already come. She walked the long way home, because over around the other side of this block, that was like the Wild West over there. Drug dealer there by the name of C-4—wasn’t even no name, but she guessed it was supposed to be tough—he let his crew do anything they wanted. She wasn’t scared of him, but she wasn’t stupid neither, and more than one time C-4’s crew was out there shooting rats in the empty lot. Bullets bounced around, didn’t they? Miss Crawford would rather take a dozen extra steps home than get shot by crossing where some punk thought he saw a creature uglier than him. Every now and again, somebody went and called the police. Didn’t help. Even if they were good police and not rotten ones, by the time they got there all the guns were hidden, or at least lying on the ground. Being caught with a gun, that was one crime it was hard to talk your way out of in Newark. Which didn’t mean the gangbangers had no guns, of course they did, every last useless one of them. It only meant they paid some attention to not getting caught.
Now, over here on this side of the block, that drug dealer Bigmouth, right there on that corner with the knit cap down over his forehead, Miss Crawford could ignore him like he deserved. She knew that boy when he was a baby, she watched him grow up on these streets. Rashawn was his name, though Miss Crawford couldn’t remember the last time she heard anyone use it. His momma, she wasn’t no good, with her men and her liquor, and all her babies had to drag themselves up because she wasn’t helping. That didn’t give Bigmouth an excuse, neither a reason, for being the way he was. It gave Miss Crawford something, though. Whenever she started to get afraid of him, she remembered him running down the street in his diapers. Then she could just walk on by.
Bigmouth anyway, he thought she was too poor to bother with and too feeble to bother him. She knew it, and it suited her, but he didn’t feel the same way about Leteesha Monroe’s oldest boy and that did not suit Miss Crawford at all. That was a promising child right there, a boy who could write poetry and nice stories, he played basketball and he could sing too. He’d be in middle school next year and he could go on to college and be somebody, if the somebody he wanted to be wasn’t more and more like Bigmouth every day. The car and the bling and the gun, that was what the Monroe boy saw, that was what all the children saw. Wasn’t easy to tell them to work hard and stay in school when it
was
easy for them to stand on street corners, just a year or two older than Leteesha Monroe’s boy, and get paid by trash like Bigmouth to steer rich white children from the suburbs to his door. Runners and snitches, Bigmouth used them as too, because everybody knows little pitchers got big ears, but everybody forgets. And to call him with the cell phone to tell him when the honest cops were coming, because who those were, and who they weren’t, was another thing everybody knew.
All this was a big problem for the new mayor, but he had lots of problems. It was a bigger problem for Leteesha Monroe, and she had lots of problems too, the poor girl working two jobs, just trying to do right by her children. Miss Crawford, her and her Teddy hadn’t never had no children, which she was sad about when she was of that age but it was behind her now. She just helped everyone else raise theirs. Her whole life she was a teacher’s aide, right here in the Central Ward, and she watched people’s babies even sometimes now, as far as her old bones would let her. Helping Leteesha Monroe, that’s what was on her mind as she pushed her cart, which was why she almost ran Bigmouth down.
Him and his cap and his pants so low she swore she didn’t know what kept them on his fat behind, they took up the whole sidewalk. Bigmouth had his hands stuck on his hips and he was smiling out across the street like he was some farmer and all this was his green pastures. He stood sideways to her and he didn’t see her and he sure didn’t move. Sometime, Miss Crawford might have just walked around him onto the grass; but last night it rained and the grass was muddy, and she had her cart with its wobbly wheel, and she’d been giving a thought to Leteesha Monroe. So him taking up the sidewalk set her anger off, and she stomped her foot and told him, “Boy, you move aside!”
His face got all surprised, like he didn’t know where the sound came from, then he looked down and saw her. Out popped that nasty grin. “Well, lookee here, Miz Busybody.”
“You didn’t buy that sidewalk, boy, so you best let people use it.”
“Why should I buy it when I already own it?” He smiled across the street; some of his crew were sitting on a stoop over there, watching and snickering.