Sons of the City (6 page)

“Damn, why you blinding me?” he said. “I didn’t do nothin'.”

“Buster,” I said, and made a motion with my thumb like I was switching off a flashlight. He finally turned it off.

“Why were you running?” I asked.

“Hey, when shooting starts in this neighborhood, you don’t stand around, you get as far away as possible. Them bullets don’t have no names on ‘em.”

“You see anything?”

“I didn’t see nothing. My feet were doing the seeing for me.”

I turned to Buster. “Get the cuffs off, but take him to Southwest anyway.”

“You arresting me?” the guy asked, as Buster fished out his handcuff key.

“No,” I said, “but you’re a witness. The detectives are gonna want to talk to you.”

“You’re just doin’ this because I’m black.” “You can shut up now,” I said.

“I ain’t shuttin’ up. You motherfuckin’ cops violated my civil rights.”

His hands were free, and he was rubbing his wrists like he had been manacled for the last ten years.

“All you cops are fuckin’ racist.”

The TV crews heard the commotion and started over.

“All right!” someone in the crowd yelled. “Go, Homicide!”

I stared at the guy. “Your nickname is Homicide?”

He took a step forward so he could see my nameplate. “Your name is North? What are you, a fucking compass?”

All of a sudden we were blinded by television lights. I quickly turned and walked away, and I could hear him saying, “That’s right, they violated my civil rights. A black man can’t walk down the street without getting harassed.”

Captain Oliver Kirk, the only guy who could legitimately wear one of Steve’s nameplates, pulled up and got out of his black Plymouth. He was in uniform—white shirt with the badge on the breast pocket and double gold bars on the shoulders—but he had a rumpled look, like he had got dressed in a hurry. His curly red hair was sticking out in all directions.

Bowman walked up, and the two of us filled the captain in. We told him that all we had so far was the gun. Detectives had already bagged it up and brought it out.

I wanted to go over to HUP to see if there was anything I could do for Michelle. Bowman hesitated a little—if I left, there’d be more work for him—but Kirk said go ahead.

I looked back at the house. It was weird—there were so many people here, cops, neighbors, reporters. But Steve was gone, and the asshole who shot him was gone. This was just the empty shell of something that had happened. All we could do was look at it, examine it. In a way, it wasn’t even real anymore.

I
found Michelle in a third-floor waiting area, down the hall from the operating room. She was standing silently with her father, and I hesitated a little before walking up to them—maybe they didn’t want to be disturbed. But Michelle looked up and spotted me, and waved me over.

“Any word?” I asked.

She shook her head no.

“Sir,” I said to her father. “I’m Eddie North, Steve’s sergeant. I just wanted to see if there’s anything I could do.”

“Thank you,” he said, and we shook hands.

Ben Ryder was a big, broad-chested man in his mid-fifties, still with powerful muscles, still with the striking good looks he had passed along to his children. Whenever I had seen him before, usually on TV, he was wearing a suit. Now he had on a navy golf shirt and khakis. I was always a little caught off-guard by his command presence. You knew that when he walked into a room, he could gain the respect of everyone there by his appearance alone. I could see why most cops considered him intimidating.

A few minutes later, Michelle’s mother arrived, a middle-aged blonde with a big purse, holding back tears. She hugged Michelle, then the Commissioner. I remembered Michelle telling me that her mother and father were divorced, but you couldn’t tell, the way they held each other. At least for the moment, they were a family again.

I told Michelle I was going to wait outside, and she nodded and took my hands in hers.

“Thanks for coming, Eddie,” she said, trying to smile.

I took the elevator downstairs and left the hospital through the emergency room entrance. The sliding glass doors whooshed open, sending me out into the warm night.

Off to one side, TV crews were setting up a bank of cameras, probably getting ready for some sort of press conference. There were reporters all over the place, trying to get comments from everyone who went in and out, including me when I passed by. I just ignored them.

Some of the cops from the 20th were standing next to their patrol cars under a lamppost in the hospital lot, smoking and talking quietly. Donna was there, and V.K. and Larry, and Marisol, and Paulie Rapone. Dave Larkin grew up with Steve, he was there, too. When I walked up they looked at me, silently asking whether I knew anything.

I just shrugged and said, “Nothing yet.”

Suddenly, we were blinded by a TV light. It was that jerkoff reporter Tim Timberlane. He didn’t give a shit about Steve—he just wanted someone to help him look good on the eleven o’clock news. It wasn’t going to be me.

“Sergeant, what can you tell me?” he asked.

“For starters,” I said, trying to look past blue spots, “I can tell you to go fuck yourself.”

The cameraman had the sense to turn off the light, but Timberlane didn’t give up. “We just want to know how you feel,” he said.

I forced myself to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t like that camera there.

Buster took a couple of steps forward and put his face in Timberlane’s face. “No one wants to talk to you,” he said. “Bye.”

“But …”

“Bye.”

Timberlane noticed that camera crews were surrounding someone outside the emergency room entrance, and he and his cameraman took off in that direction.

“Something’s going on,” I said.

An inspector was walking toward us, I couldn’t remember his name. “You the people from the Twentieth?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Commissioner sent me out here to let you know.”

Donna saw the look on his face, and cried out, “Oh, my God.”

The inspector hesitated a moment, and then said, “Steve Ryder has just died.”

In my mind, I saw Michelle’s hand on Steve’s head, trying to hold in the blood, trying to hold in the life. She couldn’t do it. No one could.

Donna and Marisol started crying first, then some of the guys. No one said anything. Ever since Steve got shot, we were moving too fast to feel anything. But now we all just stood there, wiping the tears away.

W
hen I got home that night, I sat on the couch in my darkened living room and had a beer, then another, then another. But I knew that no matter how much I drank, it wouldn’t be enough.

I still lived in the small row house Patricia and I had bought years ago. She moved out after the divorce, and I was glad to be able to stay there. It was in Oxford Circle, a peaceful neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia that had at least a couple of cops living on every block.

Of course, we all knew each other. We had backyard barbecues in the summer, and on Sunday afternoons in the fall we’d all get together to watch the Eagles on TV until it was time for the guys on four-to-midnight to head into work.

If you ever needed help—shoveling your car out of the snow or putting up a new rain gutter—there was always someone around. It didn’t matter that they worked in different districts, or that this one was a patrolman and that one a lieutenant. You were among people who understood you, understood the life of a cop.

Sitting there in my living room, I wondered whether I really wanted that life anymore. How could it be worth it, when you had to watch your friends die?

T
he day after a cop is killed is always the worst. You stand there at roll call and see that someone’s missing, and you realize he’ll never be there again. You don’t feel like going back out onto the street, but you know you have to, that’s your job.

At least there was one good thing about coming into work—we could talk to each other about Steve, trade stories about him. Buster said, Remember that night Steve found a big toy stuffed lion in a Dumpster, and stuck it in the back of a wagon? Whenever we’d open the back doors to put prisoners in, they’d scream in terror. That was classic Steve.

Like most district headquarters, ours was pretty cramped, and we had to hold our roll calls in a dimly lit, green-tiled room that doubled as a municipal courtroom. In the front of the room, two steps up, was an old judge’s bench and an American flag on a wooden pole. Sometimes at roll call the captain or one of the lieutenants would stand up there and address the troops, but I usually just stood in front of the guys at ground level. It seemed a lot less trouble.

Shortly after 4
p.m
., the twenty-eight men and women in my squad assembled for roll call. No one bothered to line up in rows, the way you’re supposed to. People were pretty much standing around in groups of two or three, with their friends.

I didn’t feel like talking, so I just told everyone to stay sharp going in on disturbances, which is what we called domestic disputes, and on man-with-a-gun calls, and any other time we rolled in on something that might suddenly turn deadly. I said we shouldn’t get so caught up in what had happened to Steve that we’d be putting our own lives in danger.

They were all very quiet. Donna was still crying a little, and Buster’s smile was gone, he looked heartbroken. Nick kept his eyes on the ground, I don’t think he once looked up. I had called him at home that morning, and told him he didn’t have to come into work. He showed up anyway.

I dismissed the squad, and they filed into the operations room to get their portable radios from the bank of chargers on the wall. They talked among themselves a little and then finally walked out into the Yard, climbed into their patrol cars, and headed out onto the street.

As I was about to join them, Dee-Dee, the captain’s secretary, came into the operations room.

“Oh, you’re still here, good,” she said. “Captain wants to see you.”

I followed her down the hallway. She turned left to go back to her desk, and I took a right and walked through the open door to Oliver Kirk’s office. I’ve been inside a lot of captains’ offices, but never one like Kirk’s. Most of the time, you’ll see plaques on the wall from the mayor or from some community group. Then there’s usually a map of whatever police district it is, with red or green pushpins showing drug pinches or maybe reported burglaries.

Kirk’s office, on the other hand, was the bridge of the starship
Enterprise.
When he first got promoted—and became Captain Kirk—guys started leaving
Star Trek
stuff in his office as a joke. He’d come in, and there’d be a little James T. Kirk action figure sitting on his empty chair. He loved it, and even started collecting the stuff himself. Now everything in his office had to do with
Star Trek.

On the walls were color stills from the original
Star Trek
series, along with a row of oil portraits of the
Enterprise
crew, which he had painted himself. They weren’t bad—you could actually tell who was who. By the door was a clock in the shape of the Star Trek insignia. Next to it was a glass display case with weapons and other devices. And in a back corner of the office, next to the window, was a lifesize cardboard cutout of James T. Kirk himself.

People who didn’t know Kirk came into his office and immediately assumed he was a nut. We used to joke that Spock—Bravelli’s Spock, not the real one—would be right at home here.

The first time I was in his office, Kirk proudly showed me what everything was. And he admitted that when he was a kid, he used to watch the TV show all the time. I could picture it—Kirk as a twelve-year-old boy, with the same curly red hair he had today, sitting in front of the TV set, eyes wide open, as his hero led the
Enterprise
to glory. Naturally, his nickname in the 20th was “James T.” Sometimes we’d forget and call him that to his face, and he never seemed to mind.

As I walked in, Kirk motioned for me to sit. It was just a regular chair, not a
Star Trek
chair or anything.

“How you doin', Eddie?” he asked, and I could tell he wasn’t doing too good himself. It’s hard for a sergeant to lose one of his men, but it’s hard for a captain, too. Maybe harder.

“He was a good kid,” Kirk said simply.

“Yeah.”

We looked at each other. What else was there to say?

“Homicide making any progress?” I finally asked.

Kirk shook his head. “No, and there’s some trouble. The black community’s getting hot about all these ped-stops. People are calling their church leaders, the church leaders are calling the politicians. It’s not good.”

“Yeah, I thought that might happen,” I said.

I knew that all day today detectives and street cops had been questioning young black guys hanging on corners. We no longer had much hope of coming across the shooter himself—he was probably hiding in another crackhouse somewhere. Our only hope was that his name—or even his nickname—would spread on the street.

When someone commits a crime that makes the papers and television, they have a hard time keeping it to themselves. They want to point to the TV and say, See that, I did that. It makes them feel powerful, like they’re really somebody. Eventually they tell someone, and that person tells someone else, and pretty soon it’s not a secret anymore.

Most of the guys we were questioning were known drug dealers and crackheads and assorted lowlifes, but some of them were also regular young guys. It wasn’t fair, and you really couldn’t blame them for complaining. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to get stopped by the cops just for walking down the street. But if there was another way of finding Steve’s killer, I didn’t know about it.

“Eddie, the reason I wanted to talk to you. We had another vigilante attack in Westmount.”

“Today?”

“Yeah, this morning. Black guy robbed an Italian grocery on Cedar, ran out and jumped in his car, car wouldn’t start.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Instead of running, he kept trying to get the car started.”

Kirk looked at me in surprise. “You already heard about this?”