The Lightning Rule (14 page)

Midnight had come and gone, yet the Central Ward was as busy and noisy as if it were midday. Rose Street, where Lossie Guthrie lived, was at the epicenter of the riot, and every road Emmett tried to turn on was blocked by hordes of looters or fire trucks. The closest Emmett could get was Tenth Street. He would have to cross through Woodland Cemetery to get to Freddie’s house.

The fencing didn’t go all the way around the fifty-five-acre graveyard, so people traipsed through as they pleased, mainly kids taking shortcuts and junkies rushing to their favorite spots to get a fix. By flashlight, Emmett could follow a beaten footpath between the thicket of tombstones. He wasn’t afraid to be there. Woodland was safer than most places at that hour. What he would face once he left did worry him. Sirens and distant gunshots fractured the cemetery’s signature silence.

Emmett could tell that he was nearing the main gate. He had come to a section devoid of headstones, a flat tract of graves for infants and children. Were it not for the divots in the ground, that part of the graveyard could have been mistaken for a meadow.

Ahead was a small Gothic church enshrouded in trees. Its turreted spire dissolved into the night sky. The church marked the cemetery’s entrance, and its gate let out onto Brenner Street, which intersected
with Rose. Emmett snapped off the flashlight. From here on, he would have to do without it.

While the main roads surrounding the area were jammed, Rose Street was deserted. The residents were nowhere to be seen. They could have been barricaded inside their apartments or out indulging in the free-for-all. For their own sakes, Emmett hoped Lossie Guthrie, and her boyfriend, Cyril, hadn’t stayed home.

Caligrassi’s thugs would be driving a nice car, so Emmett took note of the vehicles on the street. Most were older than his with rust eating away at the edges and broken windows replaced by garbage bags. The mobsters would take no pains to conceal their car by parking elsewhere. Their goal was to make their presence known. Since there was no sign, Emmett thought he might have gotten to Lossie’s first. He took the stairs two at a time up to the fourth floor and pressed his ear to the door, hand on his sidearm. He heard a pained mewling and tried the knob.

The apartment had been wrecked. The furniture was demolished. Amid the mess, Lossie’s arm was protruding from under the capsized love seat. Emmett rolled it off of her. She had been sheltering beneath the cushions.

“Mrs. Guthrie? It’s Detective Emmett.”

Traumatized, she clenched her eyes closed. A huge welt had risen on her cheek. She was clutching a rag rug that had been kicked aside in the fracas as if it was a security blanket.

“You’re okay. They’re gone. You’re safe now.”

Lossie opened her eyes timidly. She blinked as though Emmett might be a mirage. “Where is he? Where’s Cyril?”

“Is that who did this to you?” Emmett was so focused on Caligrassi’s thugs that he had forgotten what type of guy Lossie’s boyfriend was.

“No, it was them men. They hurt him. I saw it. They hurt him bad.”

Blood droplets led from the living room down the hall, confirming what type of guys Caligrassi’s thugs were. Emmett took out his revolver. Lossie huddled into herself, sobbing.

The trail ended at the bathroom. Cyril was on the floor, unconscious. His head lay at the base of the toilet in a troth of blood. The
mirror was spattered, and the corner of the sink was smeared where Cyril’s forehead had been bashed against it. Emmett got a pulse in his wrist but couldn’t rouse him. Ambrose Webster’s grandmother had mentioned that the Guthries didn’t have a telephone. Emmett would have to find one.

“Mrs. Guthrie, listen to me. Listen.” He had to shake Lossie to get her to reopen her eyes. “Cyril has to go to the hospital. I need a phone to call for an ambulance.”

She grabbed his arm. “Don’t go. Don’t. Please.”

“If you don’t let me go, Cyril could die.”

For a brief instant, she became lucid. “Okay,” she said, releasing him. “Okay.”

Emmett pounded on the door to the apartment below. “This is the police. There are injured people upstairs. I have to use your telephone.”

Nobody answered. He did the same on the second floor, then the first. No one was home, or they wouldn’t answer the door. Emmett went back to Lossie’s. She was coiled on the rug, cradling herself in her own arms and humming.

“Mrs. Guthrie, I have to go get help. I need you to sit with Cyril and make sure he keeps breathing. Can you do that?”

Lossie buried her face in the carpet and hummed louder. It was useless. He had to leave.

Emmett planned to flag the firemen from the trucks that had been obstructing the main roads and have them radio in for him. To his dismay, the fire trucks were gone. Bergen Street was abandoned, already plundered. Water dripped from burnt storefronts and washed into the gutters. The marauders and the firemen had moved on.

With the streetlamps in smithereens, all Emmett had to see by was a dwindling fire in a trash can. He spotted a pay phone outside a ravaged pharmacy. Neighborhood junkies had cleaned the shelves bare. Emmett was amazed he hadn’t run into any of them in the cemetery, reveling in their spoils. He picked up the pay phone’s receiver. There was no dial tone. The cord had been cut. Emmett was running out of options. Earlier that afternoon, he and Otis Fossum had been standing
on that very curb. He thought of Otis lamenting how he hadn’t helped with Vernon Young’s case, then Emmett remembered the call box.

The Bergen Street box was set up outside a bar named Woody’s. Boxes were often placed in close proximity to reputed trouble spots. Most bars in the neighborhood qualified, but Woody’s was notorious for its drunken brawls and for the twelve-gauge shotgun the bartender would brandish if a fight broke out. Foot patrolmen were actually prohibited from pulling at that box between the hours of one a.m. and three. Since it took five to ten minutes for a radio car to arrive at the location after a double pull, the sign for distress, it was considered too dangerous for an officer to be there on his own past one for even that short a time.

Emmett’s watch read two in the morning. He pulled the lever on the call box twice and waited.

Minutes ticked by with no response. He imagined that the Central Complaints Division was inundated with calls. Still, a double from the Bergen Street box should have been a priority. Central Complaints should have rung back as per protocol. That night, Emmett’s double pull didn’t even warrant a response.

He looked around for any lights on in apartment windows. Every single one was dark, all except the front window of Woody’s. Between the slits in the blinds, there was movement. It was the last place Emmett wanted to go or would be welcomed, but Cyril had to get to the hospital. He crossed himself and went in.

Woody’s was packed as if it was a Saturday night. There wasn’t a single white face in the crowd. Men were crowded at the bar, arm’s length from the taps, while women clustered in the jade green Naugahyde booths, sipping drinks. A haze of cigarette smoke mellowed the lights. Heads turned as the door swung closed behind Emmett.

“I need to use the phone,” Emmett announced, holding his badge in the air. “It’s an emergency. A man and woman living on Rose Street were beaten up badly and I have to call an ambulance.”

The address was a giveaway. Nobody white lived on Rose Street. The patrons would know that.

“Maybe you the one who beat ’em up,” someone mumbled.

“I need to use the phone,” Emmett repeated, unwavering. He felt someone coming up behind him.

“You all by your lonesome, Officer?” the guy said into his ear intimidatingly.

Any second Emmet expected to feel a knife or a gun press into his ribs. “All I want is to use the telephone.”

“You move on off ’a him, Billy,” said the bartender, an older man whose hair receded into a high arch. He was reaching under the counter with the practiced calm of someone who defused violence on a nightly basis. “Don’t force me to get out this here shotgun. It’s too damn hot for a ruckus.”

Billy backed away a step. “You no fun,” he told the bartender, who set a rotary dial telephone on the counter.

“Just don’t make no long-distance calls.”

Everyone stared as Emmett dialed the Complaints Division number direct. It rang and rang. Finally, somebody answered.

“Dispatch.”

“This is Detective Emmett. I need a bus at—”

“No buses available.”

“None?”

“Too many calls. First come, first served. You can tell me the location, Detective, but you’re at the end of the line. And it’s a helluva long line.”

Emmett gave Lossie’s address and hung up.

“Maybe you should ’a told ’em they was white folks,” the bartender suggested. “Then maybe they woulda come.”

“Thanks anyway.”

As Emmett headed for the door, someone muttered, “You know thing’s bad when even a cop can’t bring the cops.”

“I’ll drink to that,” another toasted.

Outside, the night air was dense with the acrid chemical odor of melted plastic. The fire in the trash can was almost out. The ambulance wouldn’t arrive for hours, if at all. Emmett did the only thing he could think to do. He went and got his car and double-parked in front of Lossie Guthrie’s building. Lossie was exactly where he left her, now
asleep on the floor. Emmett woke her, saying, “We have to bring Cyril to the hospital.”

“Okay.” She cooperated like a sleepy child, holding open the front door as Emmett slid Cyril out of the bathroom, through the apartment, and into the hall. Unconscious, the man’s muscle became ungainly dead weight.

“You’re going to have to grab his legs, Mrs. Guthrie. I can’t carry him down the stairs alone.”

She ran her hand over Cyril’s bloody brow. “Okay.”

Together they got him out of the tenement and into Emmett’s car. Because there was no backseat, Lossie had to squeeze in front, hunched on Cyril’s lap. Emmett was spent from the effort and paused to catch his breath before he could drive.

“You okay?” It was a slight variation on the single word she had been repeating. Her cheek was so badly swollen, Emmett should have been asking her that.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” he replied, though the term had ceased to signify much of anything.

An orderly helped him load Cyril onto a stretcher at City Hospital, then the orderly wheeled Cyril into the emergency room. From outside, Emmett could see that the waiting room was packed. The wounded overflowed into the hallways. Dozens were holding bloody towels to their heads and extremities. Those with leg injuries and worse lay on the floor. These were the people who had made it to the hospital. Emmett wondered how many were still waiting for ambulances.

“You go with Cyril, Mrs. Guthrie. Freddie can sleep at my house tonight.”

Her expression became quizzical, as if her son’s name was foreign to her. Freddie’s welfare hadn’t entered her mind. That made Emmett even more tired.

“Go on,” he told her. “Cyril needs you.”

Weary, Emmett went home. He rattled the key in the lock, a signal to Edward that it was him. “It’s me,” he added when he opened the door.

Edward was sitting in the dark, the pistol at his side. He clicked on the safety. “Was the kid’s mom all right?”

Emmett let his brother see the blood on his clothes. “I took her and her boyfriend to the hospital. I’d take you too, except the emergency room was jammed. We’d be there ’til morning. Might as well go then.”

“For a shiner? Please. I’ve seen worse.” Edward gestured at his legs.

“You go on to bed. I’ll stay up.” Emmett removed his jacket, grateful to finally have it off. His muscles were stiff. Hauling Cyril to the hospital had done him in.

“You’re the one who should get some sleep.” Edward handed him the glass of water he had been drinking.

Emmett guzzled it. “And you’re the one who got slugged.”

“You shoulda seen ’em, Marty. They were a pair ’a pansy hoodlums who’d watched too many Edward G. Robinson movies. What a joke. If I wasn’t….” He bridled himself and abandoned the thought. Emmett knew what he was about to say. Hearing it aloud would have been uncomfortable for both of them.

“Tell me what they looked like. Do you remember?”

“’Course I remember. How could I forget? The first guy was short, stocky. His collar was squeezing his fat neck into rolls. The other was taller, nicer suit, had a dimple in his chin so deep you could eat soup outta it.”

The second description fit Sal Lucaro to a T. Emmett sighed and dropped heavily onto the couch.

“What? You know them?”

“Only the one with the dimple.”

“Is he that big cheese mobster? The guy you liked for the murder?”

“Yup.”

“What’re you gonna do, Marty?”

“For now, I’m going to make sure they don’t come back and you’re going to get some rest.”

“I rest all day.”

“Always have to argue, don’t you?”

“We’ll take turns. One of us sleeps while the other stays awake. How ’bout that?”

“Fine.”

“You first,” they both said at once.

“You win,” Edward relented, tired. “I’ll go first.”

Emmett assisted him into bed and laid a sheet over him.

“Wake me in an hour.”

“Deal.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Emmett took the .22 from him and sat watch from the couch. He had no intention of waking his brother. Edward had been through enough. Though Lucaro and his accomplice probably wouldn’t put in another appearance that evening, part of Emmett wished they would.

A true Jesuit should have prayed for them and their sins. A true Jesuit should have prayed away any feelings of revenge. Emmett wasn’t a Jesuit anymore. The payback he prayed for kept him awake the rest of the night.

The watery dawn light woke Emmett, that and the voice of Director Sloakes. He had tucked the police band radio next to his pillow, the volume low. Sloakes was making an announcement.

“As of this Friday, the fourteenth of July, 1967, the mayor has officially declared a state of emergency. The National Guard and state police have been called in to aid our department in this time of crisis. Troopers and Guardsmen are presently arriving at the Roseville armory and will continue to arrive throughout the day. Your orders are to patrol in radio cars in groups of four. One patrolman will be assigned to guide two troopers and one Guardsman around the city. Continuing updates will be broadcast throughout the day.”

“Better late than never,” Emmett said with a yawn.

“You awake.” Mrs. Poole was tiptoeing down the stairs.

He stood up and rubbed his face. His wristwatch said it was quarter to six. Emmett hadn’t gotten up that early since he was a novice. Even then, it felt unnatural.

“At this hour, I’m as close to awake as I can be.”

They were speaking in the hushed tones parents would use around a slumbering baby so as not to disturb Edward, who was asleep in the
dining room. His eye was a deeper shade of a purple than last night, making the bruise on his forehead from his fall seem minor.

“I put Freddie in the other bedroom upstairs. I hope that’s okay.”

It was Emmett’s childhood room that he had shared with his brother. Of the two twin mattresses, Edward’s was now downstairs. Freddie was sleeping in Emmett’s old bed.

“Of course. Did he give you any flak?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“No doubt. How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad. I was more shaken up than anything.”

He could tell that Mrs. Poole wanted to hear about where he had been but wouldn’t ask. “I’m truly sorry about what happened.”

“Don’t be sorry for me, Mr. Emmett. Be sorry for him.” She motioned at Edward. “If he could’ve, your brother would have jumped up out ’a his wheelchair and clobbered those men senseless. Not being able to, that had nothing on the beatin’ he took.”

Edward was breathing heavily in his sleep, his chest rising and falling tranquilly. Emmett wondered if his brother could walk in his dreams or if he was in the wheelchair then too.

“I’m gonna put on a pot of coffee,” Mrs. Poole said.

She went into the kitchen, and he trailed her. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

“Depends on the something.” She poured water into the coffeepot.

“What was it like having your husband in a wheelchair?”

“It was no picnic,” she admitted, ladling in the coffee grounds. “But I’d rather have had him alive and in the chair than not have him at all.”

She plugged in the pot and took a pair of mugs from the cupboard. “Percy stepped on a land mine. Lost both legs from the knees down. Should’ve killed him. When he got out of the hospital, he couldn’t look me in the eye. I’d been married to him for going on fifteen years and he couldn’t look at me. Said he was ashamed to be half a man. I told him I was thankful to have half and I’d have gladly taken less. Easy for me to say ’cause it was true. Wasn’t easy for him to believe. That’s the rough
part. Believing that life isn’t over. That it hasn’t been cut in half and is still worth living.”

The coffee began to perk. “Try explaining that to Edward,” Emmett said.

“Have you? Tried, I mean.”

“He won’t tell you this, so I will,” Emmett confided. “Edward wasn’t supposed to be there when it happened. The troops had driven the Vietcong out of the Iron Triangle and captured their supplies, crates of M-16s and medical kits and rations they’d stolen from American bases. He was fresh off the plane from Fort Dix, been in Vietnam for less than a month, and his job was to repair the radios and radars on the howitzers. That day, they had him driving a six-by-six truck to cart off all the contraband. When Edward got out of the truck to load in the crates, a sniper shot him from a concealed tunnel, hit him in the base of the spine. Do you want to know what was in those crates? Tin cans of peas. My brother will never walk again. And for what? For a crate of peas.”

The coffeepot stopped bubbling and fell quiet.

Emmett hadn’t been in favor of the war. Every day, he went to work in a war zone, and he had seen firsthand that there were never any winners. He hadn’t been able to talk Edward out of enlisting, so he held himself partially responsible for the accident, an older brother who had failed his younger brother. It was one of many in a long list of failures.

“You can be angry, Mr. Emmett. You got every right. But don’t you think Edward’s angry enough for the both of you? Somebody’s got to show him how not to be.”

“I’m not sure I’m the person to do that, Mrs. Poole.”

She poured him a mug of coffee and pushed it along the counter, as if passing him a note. “You’re his brother. You’re all he’s got. You don’t do it, nobody will.”

Emmett brought the mug to his lips and blew on it. The coffee was too hot to drink. He put the mug aside. “I have to get ready. I have to go.”

“Again?”

“It’ll be okay. Gangsters don’t get out of bed this early in the morning.”

“I’ll have to remember that,” she said.

“There’s a file I need from the station house. As soon as I get it, I’ll come straight home.”

“You promise, Mr. Emmett?”

He had broken his promise to Edward last night. This time, he wouldn’t. “Yes, I promise.”

Emmett showered, shaved, and changed into a clean suit, then tucked an extra box of bullets into his jacket pocket. He went by his old bedroom on the way downstairs. The door was half open.

Baseball pennants hung on the walls. Atop the dresser, Edward’s basketball trophies mingled with Emmett’s from track and field. The rising sun glinted off the medals and brass figurines. Freddie lay curled on the bed. He had kicked off the covers and was hugging the pillow tightly to him, anxious even in his sleep.

In the burgeoning daylight, the living room looked like a crime scene. Chairs were flung over, and books and lamps were scattered across the floor, chaos for the sake of chaos. It was as if the riot had spilled into Emmett’s house.

“They did a real number on the place, didn’t they?”

Mrs. Poole was putting away yesterday’s dishes from the drying rack. “I’ll clean up, Mr. Emmett. I don’t believe they broke anything.”

Nothing tangible, Emmett thought.

“I should be back before Freddie or Edward are up. If I’m not, you can’t let Freddie leave. Not for a second. He listens to you, Mrs. Poole. He’ll do what you say.”

“The boy’s in real trouble, isn’t he?”

Telling her how much would frighten her. “Just don’t let him go anywhere.”

Emmett’s mug of coffee had cooled. He finished it in three gulps, then went and hid his .22 under the bedsheet, right beside Edward’s hand.