Slow Motion Riot (25 page)

Richard Silver put down the newspaper
story he was reading about Darryl King and gave all his attention to the guy on
the other end of the phone.

"You're not hearing what I'm
telling you," he said.

"I guess not," said the
guy from the personnel agency. He sounded like a kid, probably filling in for
somebody regular at the firm. "You asked for a secretary who could type
fifty-five words a minute, and so we sent you a secretary who could do that. I
don't understand what the problem is."

Richard Silver leaned back in the
chair behind his desk and peered out the doorway. His new secretary, Patricia,
a matronly looking black woman in her fifties, was still out getting coffee.

"The problem is I asked for a
front office type, and you sent me somebody who belongs in a back office,"
he explained.

"I'm not sure I catch your
drift," the kid said.

"Oyshh," Richard Silver
sighed, pulling out a desk drawer and putting his feet in it.

He looked down on his desk and saw
the Chicago phone number written on a pink message slip. He closed his eyes and
shook his head. Every time he thought about making that call, he wanted to
reach for a Di-Gel. There were days when the whole thing made him proud of his
ingenuity, and there were days when it made him feel cheap and ashamed. Today
it was just getting on his nerves. The number on his desk was like an
embarrassing stain on his clothes.

Meanwhile, the kid from the
personnel agency was still sounding perplexed. "I don't get it," he
was asking. "What's the difference between a front office type and
somebody in a back office."

"The problem," Richard
Silver told him, "is the tone."

"Tone?"

"Yeah, the tone of the person
you sent me."

The kid from the agency was
flabbergasted. "Was she rude?"

"Rude? No. Not at all. She's
like Aunt Jemima. I'm just looking for somebody a little more Manhattan, and a
little less Bronx."

"Huh?"

"Somebody with more of a front
office demeanor."

The kid still didn't get it.
Richard Silver looked up at the ceiling and calculated the chances that the kid
on the phone might be black himself. Knowing this particular personnel agency,
he decided the odds against it were about a million to one.

"Look," he told the kid
finally. "Let me put it to you this way. I'm looking for someone who's a
little bit more like you and me. You know what I mean?"

A few seconds passed. "Ohhh, I
got it," the kid from the personnel agency said finally. "Whyn't you
say so before?"

"Because that's not the way
nice people do things," Richard Silver said. "So you send me somebody
else next week."

"Somebody with the right tone."

"Yeah, this is a modern office
I'm starting here," Richard Silver said before hanging up.

He took his feet out of the desk
drawer and picked up the newspaper again. By the time he was done reading,
Patricia was back with her coffee. He stood up and buttoned his suit jacket.

"I'm going to lunch," he
told her. "And I'll probably be gone the rest of the afternoon. I'll call
in later for messages."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Silver."

Just as he turned to go, he
realized the Chicago phone number was still sitting on his desk. He picked it
up almost daintily, folded it over once, and put it in his breast pocket.

"Patricia?" he said,
stepping around the desk and heading out for the elevators.

"Yes, sir?"

"You have a nice day."

You'd think that once Dawson gives
me my job back and lets me take the rest of the day off, I'd get in a much
better mood. But I don't. All the way back uptown to my house, it keeps
bothering me; people are going to think I wasn't doing my job.

It's more than just telling
everybody what actually happened in Bernstein's courtroom. I have to convince
myself that I did everything I could to stop Darryl from getting out. And in
the back of my mind, this other crazy thought keeps coming back to me: That
maybe there was something I should've done to turn Darryl around.

For the moment I'm feeling too
mixed-up to figure that one out, so I try to use the free time I have to pull
myself together, instead of doing paperwork. I put on The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn by Pink Floyd and start working out, like I'm trying to get in shape for a
fight with Darryl. I do one hundred pushups and one hundred sit-ups and then I
pump a twenty-pound weight seventy-five times behind my head and seventy-five
times in front of my stomach. My muscles start to ache and I tell myself I'm
never going to see Darryl again anyway. But I have to keep doing it.

After I repeat that whole routine a
couple of times, I just sit by the window, drinking coffee and watching life go
by for a couple of hours. This is kind of interesting at first, because I'm not
usually home at this hour. I decide that the city has a secret daytime life.
There's a discrete army of people out there who you never see out at night. As
a group they tend to be older, slightly misshapen men and women, moving slowly
and quietly down the sidewalk, dragging shopping carts behind them. Their faces
are etched with a kind of gentle resignation and acceptance of life's
disappointments.

After midnight, you see a
completely different group around here. They're younger, they never wear
shirts, they do a lot of drugs, scream at people going by, demand money, and
generally are less quietly accepting of life's little disappointments.

Pretty quickly, I start getting
bored and restless again. I don't know what to do with myself, but this big
generator is roaring away inside of me. For a few minutes, I just pace back and
forth, chain-smoking and telling myself I don't need a drink. Finally I decide
to look at things as though I were one of my clients, and make out a list of goals.

I get out a yellow legal pad and
write down number one. Finish those fucking law school applications. I've
already made a stab at beginning an essay: "Having toiled for two years in
the bloody, squalling emergency room of New York's criminal justice system, I
now believe I am ready for specialized surgery..." Needs work, but it's a
start. Number two is cut back on my drinking, as it's giving me a bad headache
right now and clouding my thinking. Which leads me to number three: see Andrea
again. Thinking about her is making me a little nuts. If she doesn't want to
see me again, then so be it, but I have to hear it directly from her.
Especially if there's a chance I can talk her out of it.

Number four is even more
impractical, but it feels good to get it out of my head and on to the page:
Find Darryl King and bring him back. I keep having this fantasy about what it
would've been like if I'd been there for his big shoot-out with the cops. At
least then no one could've said I didn't try.

For the moment, I decide to skip to
number three and try to find Andrea. I've left a dozen messages for her over
the past week without an answer. I always tell my clients it never does any
good standing around waiting for life to happen to you, so I shower, get
dressed, and go over to her house on the Upper West Side, unannounced, at eight
o'clock.

Of course, the doorman in her old
limestone apartment building says she isn't home, so I have no choice but to
stake out the entrance of her building from the Mexican restaurant across the
street. I know this sounds bad and maybe a little sick, watching her house the
way the Field Service guys watch for a probation violator. But I need to see
her so badly that it's like an itch inside my heart. I can't do anything else,
except think about her.

The waitress comes over to take my
drink order. She's cute, with long blonde hair and a low-cut blouse, and she
gives me a big smile. But compared to Andrea, she doesn't do a thing for me, so
I just order a Coke.

She brings over a basket full of chips
as I keep looking out the window at the entrance to Andrea's building. At about
a quarter past ten, I see a girl about her height come out of the lobby and
toss her hair in that sexy way I was hoping to get used to. My heart starts to
pound. Cars cruise by with their headlights throwing crucifixes of light across
the restaurant's window. For a second, I lose sight of the girl coming out of
the building. But then she steps out into the street light, and I see that
she's white. I lean back in my chair and sip my Coke. Between Andrea and Maria
Sanchez, I don't know what's up with me and girls who aren't white. Even Barbara
Russo was kind of Mediterranean-looking. I wonder what a shrink would make of
that. Or my father.

A mariachi band plays on the
speakers and the waitress tells me that one of the specials is enchilada suiza,
just like at the Tex-Mex place where Andrea and I had dinner that night. The
man and woman in matching pin-striped jackets at the next table are talking
about commodities futures. I get scared that Andrea might be out with Joel, the
nasty yuppie she mentioned. Maybe all she's interested in is money. If that's
so, then I never really stood a chance with her.

Another waitress comes by and asks
me if I'd like to try the house margarita. With the mood I'm in, I have to hang
on tight and say no. If I start drinking now, I'll be truly lost. I nurse my
Coke for another fifteen minutes, and then I see someone I'm sure is her coming
around the corner. I slap a five on the table and go running out. She's already
crossing the street by the time I get outside. I go racing after her, as the
light changes to red. A car almost hits me and the driver gives me the finger.
I catch up to her on the corner and lay a hand on her arm.

"Steve," she says in a
surprised tone that makes it sound like she's not sure if she likes the name or
not.

"I was just in the
neighborhood, you know..."

I don't get invited upstairs, but I
do get her to agree to come for dinner on Friday. And that's enough to improve
my mood and send me humming with anticipation for the rest of the dreary week I
have to spend in the field. In fact, I may not even feel so bad next time I see
one of those Free Darryl King banners.

The Probation Department quickly
began to put the word out about what really happened in the Darryl King
hearing, and by the next day the tabloids had stories that threw the blame for
his release back onto the judge. Several of them specifically explained that it
was actually a tip from Darryl's probation officer that led police to get a
warrant and try to arrest Darryl. One source in the Probation union even went
so far as to say that Darryl's officer was still actively helping the police
investigation to find him.

The story was then picked up by an
assignment editor for one of the local news shows. At 6:19, the show's
anchorwoman delivered a rewritten version of the newspaper story. By now, a
number of factual errors had crept in. The anchorwoman, who had light brown
hair and bright blue eyes, stumbled once reading from the Teleprompter and then
said Probation had taken over the Darryl King investigation.

"That's quite a turnaround,
Jane," the show's coanchor, a blond man, told the camera.

"It sure is," Jane, the
anchorwoman, said.

While the news was on, Joanna
Coleman spoke with Darryl on the untapped phone line she had installed when she
learned her regular phone was bugged.

"Check this shit out,"
Joanna said.

"What?" Darryl asked.

From his end of the line, he could
barely hear the anchor-woman saying, "King's probation officer apparently
has a personal stake in bringing the alleged gunman to justice..."

"They're saying your probation
officer is the one who give you up," Joanna told him.

"I thought you said it was
Eddie."

"Maybe it was the both of
them."

The woman's voice on the television
kept going on and on.

"Oh... I don't... Oh, I don't
believe this shit," Joanna sputtered.

"What's she saying now?"
Darryl King asked as a baby began crying on his end of the line. "Shut the
fuck up back there!"

"She says your probation
officer got a warrant against you and he be looking for you right now."

"Then he's one dead
motherfucker," Darryl King said.

There was a very long pause.
"Don't be talking that stupid shit on this phone!" Joanna angrily
told her brother. "Don't you think like I told you no more? You're not
visualizing. You be acting like a Taurus again."

"Whass up?" Darryl asked
in a sluggish voice.

"I don't want any more bugs in
my house! It's bad enough my other phone's bugged." She hung up abruptly.

Neither Darryl nor his sister was
watching when a very agitated-looking police commissioner appeared on the
eleven o'clock news insisting emphatically that his department was indeed still
in charge of the Darryl King investigation.

I spend most of Friday getting
ready for my dinner with Andrea, consulting an old cookbook I haven't opened
since college to get the recipe for Chicken Fricassee with green peppers and
tomatoes. I buy more than thirty dollars' worth of groceries, including endive,
wild rice, a bottle of expensive wine, and a chocolate mousse cake for the
dessert. I'm a reasonably good cook, but I know my limitations.

I borrow pots and pans from the old
lady down the hall and use the chipped night table first as a carving board and
then as the dinner table. It takes me five minutes to hack up the chicken,
forty-five minutes to season it, and then I give it an hour and a half in the
oven. As the sun goes down, I realize I need candlelight to make it a truly
romantic dinner. I run to the occult bookstore down the street and buy six
black candles with satanic pentangles on the sides. While the chicken cooks, I
scrape the symbols off with a razor.

I put out my best and only table
settings, and then look around and see the rest of the place is a mess. There
are stacks of probation files and beer cans everywhere that I stopped noticing
months ago. Maybe my father isn't the only one in the family who stockpiles
things. I put the cans in a Hefty bag in the closet, stow the files in a kitchen
cabinet, and finally throw out Barbara Russo's earring. I hope I won't be
needing it anymore.

To my profound relief, Andrea
appears to like the food. She compliments me on the dressing, which I didn't
make, and the garlic bread, which I did.

When she sits back with a contented
smile, I figure it's time to try to entertain her. "So did I tell you
about the one we had in the field yesterday?"

"Which one's that?" she
asks dabbing her mouth daintily with a napkin.

"Sharon Young. Sheila Young.
Something like that." It's funny that I don't remember names as well in
the field as I did in the office. "Anyway, she originally got picked up on
a cocaine charge, and she didn't make her hearing, so we go looking for her
again. Right? So we find her out on the street about a block from her house. I
don't wanna think about what she's doing out there. But when we come up to her,
she's like .. .vibrating."

I do my best facial expression of
somebody riding a cocaine buzz. Andrea nods like she understands.

"So we decide to bullshit her
a little," I say. "We tell her that we're gonna take her downtown and
have her urine tested right away. I know it's a little more complicated than
that, but we're just trying to put a little pressure on her. So you know what
she says?"

"No. What?"

"She says, 'Oh, I don't do
cocaine anymore. But my boyfriend does. So before you test me, you all oughta
know I give him head a lot of the time, so it may show up anyway.'"

Bill and Angel were in hysterics
laughing when this incident happened, but Andrea's only smiling thinly. Maybe
I'm telling it wrong. I try another story.

"Did I tell you about the
crack dealer we picked up in the wheelchair.

She holds up her fork.
"Steven," she says coolly. "Do you think maybe you're spending a
little too much time with those macho jerks in the Field Service Unit?"

"They're not jerks. They're my
friends."

She goes back to eating her salad.

"You don't know what it's like
out there," I tell her. "You need guys like Bill and Angel with you.
I mean, we were at this one place near Mount Sinai when people started throwing
shit at us."

"Was it a protest over that
kid getting shot by the cop?" she asks.

"No, it was jealousy that we
can walk around on two feet."

That came out a little sharper than
I intended it, and she looks at me inquisitively with those gray eyes.

"You know what it is," I
say, trying to explain myself. "It's this whole Darryl King thing. I'm
just sorry I didn't duck when my supervisor gave me that assignment."

"Why?" Andrea asks.

"Because everything's gone
wrong since then. I mean, first he comes into my office and goes nuts. Then he
goes and violates on this car theft, which was what he did probably right after
he killed that drug dealer in Harlem..."

Andrea puts her fork down. "Where'd
you hear that?"

"Just out on the street...
Anyway, you saw what happened when I tried to get him violated in court. And
then he goes and shoots all these cops and then they shoot some poor schmuck
kid and the city's in an uproar. So that's why I wish he hadn't come into my office."

"I see," she says.

"Plus, now, I had this
disciplinary meeting on Tuesday morning because of what the judge said and I
almost got fired..."

"Was this Deputy Dawg who did
this to you?"

I laugh because I never knew
anybody else called Dawson that.

"He's gross," Andrea
says. "You know he tried to ask me out at the beginning of the
summer."

"Is that right?"

"Yeah. But now he goes out
with Cathy Brody."

"Really? Is he into that S
& M business too?"

"Yeah," she says with a
sweet smile, "they spend every weekend hitting each other over the head
with free weights."

I knew there was a good reason I
liked this girl.

"Anyway," I say.
"This whole thing with Darryl has really got me kind of down. I mean, he
shouldn't have been on probation in the first place. I'm not gonna change him."

"Why do you say it like
that?"

"Like what?"

"With that funny look on your
face."

I don't know what she's talking
about. "Well, I'm not going to change him," I go on. "If
anything he's going to change me."

"It sounds like he's done that
already," she says, examining the remnants of the satanic pentangle on one
of the candles.

All of a sudden I start feeling
defensive. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I hope you're not
losing patience with all the rest of the people on probation. They're not all
like Darryl, you know."

"I know. I know."

She takes a couple of mouthfuls of
dessert and looks up at me. "You don't sound very convincing," she
says. "When was the last time you saw one of your old clients?"

There I have her. "I'm seeing
some of them next week," I say, reaching for a cigarette and then deciding
I don't need it. "They gave me a special report day or two so I can come
into the office and catch up on some of the work I fell behind on in the field."

"People at the office have
been asking where you are," she says.

"Really? Who?"

"Well, like Miriam who I work
with."

I picture heavyset Miriam, the
secretary with the long fingernails and the Clark Gable mustache, giving me
dirty looks in the legal department. "I thought she didn't like me," I
say.

"Oh, she thinks you're kind of
a skeezy guy, but she likes to know what everyone's up to. Especially after she
saw all that stuff on television about Darryl King. She knew that was your
client."

Who doesn't? I keep having these
daydreams about bringing him in myself. But I guess that can never happen, so
there's no point in mentioning it to Andrea.

"So where've you been?" I
say, turning the tables on her.

"Well, you knew I was away for
a long kayaking weekend with my family, right?"

"Kayaking?"

"Yeah, you know, it's like
rowing," she says with a paddling motion. "I used to really be into
guys who had those big muscles on the bottom of their arms from using the
paddle."

I try not to let her see that I'm
reaching around with my right hand and feeling the muscles on the bottom of my
left arm. They're puny. Why don't the push-ups and weights build them up more?

"Maybe kayaking's only
something we do in Princeton," Andrea says, drawing her knees up in front
of her on the seat. "Do you do any sports?"

"I go to ball games
sometimes." It'd be nice if I could somehow rustle up some tickets to take
her to a Mets game, I think.

"How about swimming?" she
says. "Do you ever go swimming?"

I don't answer right away,
remembering the time my father threw me into the deep end of somebody's
swimming pool when I was very small. I can still smell the chlorine and feel
the icy water closing over my head. I see the watery blur of my father's image
receding from me as I sink deeper. I shiver and try to wipe it out of my mind.

Meanwhile, Andrea's asking if I've
ever been skiing. Where does she get these goyisheh activities? I try to
imagine myself huddling with her around two hot chocolate mugs at a cozy
resort. But the picture won't quite coalesce in my mind. I can see Andrea, the
fireplace, the skis, and the preppy sweaters, but I can't put my own face in
the scene.

I sense a distance growing between
us. I can't afford the kind of life she's talking about. I wonder if she thinks
I'm just a shlub from Flushing and that's the reason she's pulling away from
me.

"So why've you been acting
cold lately when I run into you in the halls?"

Her face goes blank. "What do
you mean?" she says.

I try to be more specific with my
questions, the way I would at work. "Why haven't you been returning my
phone calls? I called you three times last week..."

"I was busy," she says
vaguely, letting her eyes wander around the room.

I know I should ease off now and
just let it drop, but I can't help myself. "And why'd you walk right by me
in the hall the other day?"

She drops her spoon and her jaw
clenches. "Don't talk to me that way, Steven," she says stiffly.
"You're not going to find out anything by talking like I'm one of your
criminals."

That stops me for a moment and I
sink down a little in my chair. I can hear the old couple downstairs having
another fight and throwing things around. I hope we don't sound like them
already.

"You've got to learn to be
more patient," she says in a more conciliatory tone. "This isn't one
of your five-minute interviews at the office. I can't give you those kinds of
definitive answers. My life isn't like that. Things change."

"I know," I say, trying
to sound more casual. "But I still have to wonder what's gonna happen with
you and me."

Her face loses its hard cast and
she gives me a wistful smile. "I don't know, Steven," she says.
"I wish I could tell you what was going to happen."

I take that as a sign that my heart
is about to get broken, so I try to beat her to the punch. "I'm
sorry," I say quietly. "I'm being an asshole. You wanna just forget
the whole thing?"

"No," she says.

"Well, what do you want to do
then?"

She doesn't say anything for a long
time. She just keeps looking me in the eye from across the table. At first I
think I must have a smudge of newspaper on my forehead or something.

"Hey, if you just want to call
it a day, it's no problem," I say, trying to sound cool and breezy enough
to take the pressure off her. "I can handle it."

She's still giving me that searching
stare, like my face has something she's looking for. I'm becoming aware that
the corners of my mouth have turned down without consulting me. I wonder if
that's it. After thirty or forty more seconds, she finally gets up and walks
over to my side of the table.

"What am I going to do with
you, Steven?" she says, standing behind me and putting her hands on my
shoulders.

"What do you mean?"

"You take everything so
hard."

She rubs my shoulders for a couple
of seconds and hums to herself. The summer heat is making my eyelids heavy and
my back sweaty. There's an endless black sky outside the window. A dog barks in
the distance.

"What do you say I take you to
bed?" she asks.

She whips off her clothes and then
mine, climbs on top of me, and rides me through the wee morning hours. I fall
asleep with my arms and legs wrapped tightly around her, like I'm holding on
for dear life. I wake up once with a dry throat and an urge for a drink. But I
remember my list of goals, so I lie still until the feeling passes. I'd hate to
have her wake up and see me guzzling whiskey now anyway.

Just before I go back to sleep, I
hear a car alarm going off below my window. It blares loudly for a minute or
two and then I hear it being driven away, its squall gradually receding into
the night.

In the morning, I awake and find
her fully dressed and ready to go. She's drinking a cup of coffee and looking
through some papers on my desk.

"What're these?" she
asks.

I wipe my eyes and struggle out of
bed, pulling on a T-shirt and sweatpants. The dirty dishes are still in the
sink and Mario Cuomo, a Persian cat who lives in the building, is licking the
wineglass on the table.

Bleary-eyed and lank-haired, I make
my way across the room and kiss her good morning. She hands me a cup of coffee
and I see she's looking at my law school applications and essays. I'm tempted
to snatch them out of her hands in embarrassment, but instead I start doing the
dishes in the sink and try to casually discourage her from reading any more.

"I'm sure you won't find
anything interesting there," I tell her, squirting around white
dishwashing liquid.

"You didn't tell me you were
applying to law school," she says, not taking her eyes off the page.

"Well, I haven't applied yet.
I'm not sure if I'm going to."

"You know, this isn't bad what
you wrote so far," she says. "Except maybe you should leave out that
gory stuff about the emergency room of criminal justice."

"Tell you the truth, I don't
think I'm gonna send that in."

She puts her hands on her hips.
"Why not?"

I look down at the floor. "I
don't know," I mumble. "It doesn't seem right for me. You know. Being
a lawyer. It's like selling out or something."