The Last Good Day (3 page)
But then, two days before Thanksgiving, that plan went bust. Yes, it did. He could still picture the Verizon Wireless bill he was about to pay when the phone rang. Mike saying there’d been a bad shooting in the Hollow. That damn fool child Replay Washington had taken a round in the back running from P.O. Woyzeck with a 3 Musketeers bar in his hand that looked just like a .22 at thirty paces. Shit happens. But this time it happened in the middle of Operation Ivory Snow, the hyperaggressive anticrack patrols Mike set up to make the waterfront safe for developers. After that, there was no way Mike would ever make chief. All the New York City liberals who’d moved up here for the boom a few years back went crazy, and the baggy old country-club Republicans who stacked the Town Board pronounced themselves shocked—
shocked!
—to discover there were only three black police officers in a town that was one quarter African American. And so Reverend Ezekiel P. Philips of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church down in the Hollow, whose great-great-grandfather Obediah had led a congregation of ex-slaves in horse-drawn wagons up from Elizabeth, North Carolina, after seeing a vision of a river running the wrong way, had taken Harold aside and said, “Son, it’s time we give that big stick to one of our own.”
So how was he supposed to say no? He would’ve been letting down not just his family, who’d been going to the church for three generations, but the whole community on Fenton, Shantytown, Bank, and all the other crooked little dogleg streets down by the river, all the people he’d sat next to in church and shared barbecue with since he was a boy. Still, on a day like this, he longed to be sitting quietly in an anonymous back room with a stack of pink invoices and an IBM calculator.
“Anyway,” Mike said, “you want to have a couple of extra officers handling calls for dispatch?”
“That’s a good idea. For the next few days, we’re probably going to need all hands on deck.”
“I promised all the moms I’d do soccer practice from four-thirty to five-thirty, but I’ll shit-can it,” said Mike, watching Paco smooth down the foot impressions.
“No, don’t,” said Harold. “At least put in an appearance. Make them feel like everything’s normal and under control.”
“All right. I’ll stay just a few minutes and then come back here ’til midnight.”
“What about Marie?” Harold knew they were at each other’s throats about hours lately.
“I’ll call and see if we can get the Mexican girl to stay late. It’s all right. I’m a dead man at home anyway.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Harold touched him lightly on the shoulder. “You know, I’d have your back if things had broke the other way.”
“Yeah, I know.”
The wind had suddenly subsided, leaving a slightly unnatural calmness along the shore. The gulls that had been walking along the bank with pieces of yellow crime scene tape stuck to their beaks flew away, and the ducks that had been floating nearby like bystanders drifted off. Violent death in the outdoors always changed the ecosystems around it, Harold noticed. Blood seeped into soil, green bottle flies swarmed, gases expanded, putrefaction set in, eels wriggled in the shallows.
“You know what this is going to turn out to be, don’t you?” Mike looked back at the body under the sheet. “This is going to be another dump job from upstate, like the one we had in May.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Harold.
“It’s obvious. Somebody goes to the trouble of cutting the head off a victim so she can’t be identified, and right away you have to start thinking organized crime. This is probably another drug dealer’s skanky girlfriend from Newburgh who pissed the old man off, got herself whacked, and then was driven down and tossed out in our parts. And it’ll turn out that people around here will have gotten their bowels in an uproar over something that has nothing to do with them.”
“Excuse me, but I don’t think so,” Paco, the new man, spoke up as he knelt beside the body, waiting for the plaster to dry.
He was a short pugnacious Hispanic guy from the Bronx, with a shaved head, a little earring, and a goatee that looked like a small dark hand over the bottom of his face. He’d been working his way up through the ranks of the NYPD when he discovered that there was a much faster route to promotion—not to mention a better chance of owning his own home—in these suburban towns with rapidly expanding Latino populations and no other Spanish-speakers on the job. Of course, some of the older guys in the Riverside Department resented getting leapfrogged and subtly insinuated that the ethnics were sticking together when Harold gave the newbie his shield this summer. But hey, Harold told them, they could always take night classes at Berlitz.
“So, what do you think it is?” Harold asked.
“Come over here and check it out.”
Paco gingerly lifted the side of the sheet with his thumb and forefinger as Harold navigated down the incline in his loafers, with Mike close behind. Underneath the little tent was the mottled moonscape of a flank. Harold’s eyes quickly found a light surgical scar on the underside of a breast. But Paco was pointing out another small white line in the flesh, this one low on the left buttock, a mark the size of half a matchstick.
“What is that?” asked Harold.
“Maybe she sat on a nail or something when she was a kid,” Mike said in an unsteady voice as he crouched down to get a better look.
“No, man”—Paco dropped the sheet in disgust—“that’s liposuction.”
“What?” said Harold.
He was aware of Mike becoming very still, staring down so intently that the chief could almost hear the liquid dab of his blink.
“She had her fat sucked.” Paco lifted the sheet again so they could see for themselves. “And that ain’t cheap, bro. That operation costs about three thousand dollars. I’m thinking this lady wasn’t broke, and I’m thinking maybe she
was
from around here.”
THERE
. SHE TOOK
the shot and moved back into the doorway again like a sniper. You rarely saw grown men looking that scared in broad daylight.
She quickly changed her angle, worried that she was about to lose this moment. Something about the way the sun broke over the old warehouses and abandoned factories on Evergreen Avenue turned the clouds into light boxes and made the men down the street look dwarfed and vulnerable, like shadowy figures in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. She ducked behind a Dumpster and changed to a shorter telephoto lens, reeling off a couple more quick shots from thirty yards away, making sure she was at least covered in case they didn’t want their pictures taken today.
It had been such a struggle to get here in time for the morning shape-up, when eighty or ninety men from Mexico and Guatemala gathered in front of the Starbucks around the corner from the train station and waited for contractors to drive by and offer them work. She’d had to get up early, fix breakfast for the kids, make sure her equipment was ready, drive Barry to the station because the other car was still in the shop, drop Hannah and Clay off at school, sign up for the book drive and karate classes, make appointments for parent-teacher conferences, call the Dryer Man and Tree Guy again, and then race back here to find a place to park before the crowd dispersed.
A blue-and-white Chevy Suburban cruised by slowly, the contractor behind the wheel looking saturnine and jowly, a surly lump of a man with rolls of fat on his neck and a tiny stump of cigar tucked into the corner of his mouth. He could’ve been a corrupt Eastern bloc bureaucrat or the owner of a carnival with dangerous rides. Yet the laborers came rushing at him as if they were bobby-soxers and he was Frank Sinatra in the trim glory of youth. And for a few seconds, she was no longer Lynn Schulman, loving wife and mother of two children. She was all hand and eye. She shot and advanced, shot and advanced, as the men surrounded the van in their Gap T-shirts, Spackle-covered 501 jeans, and dusty Timberlands. She adjusted the f-stop, making sure she had the Starbucks sign and the flag in the window framed behind them. In their rising voices, she could hear that there was no longer enough work to go around. Friends and relatives—men who’d dragged one another barely alive across the Arizona border—were elbowing and shoving one another out of the way for the right to build a stone wall around some investment banker’s McMansion up in the hills.
She found a milk crate to stand on as two muscular guys jumped in the back of the van, leaving their unemployed friends behind on the sidewalk. She clicked away, capturing the half-open mouths, the raised hands, and the hope getting extinguished in their eyes.
A powerfully built little guy with the face of an Aztec warrior and the haircut of a Beatle fan turned to a taller dejected friend, a frayed rope of a man in a straw cowboy hat and a ragged plaid shirt. The little guy grabbed the cowboy’s stringy arm and patted his muscle, as if trying to assure him that they were both still robust and strong enough to somehow survive the long winter ahead. She took the picture and then slowly lowered the Canon, knowing that her morning had just been made.
An instructor at Pratt had once quoted Balzac to her: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” In her heart, she knew that behind every good picture she’d taken there was an invasion. Certainly she should’ve asked their permission. Usually, she would have. In the rest of her life, she tried to be a decent, sensitive person. But
damn,
that was going to be a good shot. She could already see where it would hang in her show in the spring. Maybe a little Walker Evans in the composition, but it told its own story. It said,
This is what it’s about.
It said,
You go until you can’t take it anymore, and then you keep going.
It said,
You walk over mountains, hang over the sides of boats, crawl across the desert with your kidneys shriveling up like chestnuts, and have yourself sewn into the upholstery of vans smuggling you across the border because that’s what a man does.
He endures. He persists. So here they were, still hustling, still squeezing one another’s arms for encouragement and trying to scrape together a few crumpled dollars to send home.
All right,
fine.
She’d ask their permission so her conscience could take five and stop bothering her. She stepped down off the crate and hoisted the canvas camera bag up onto her shoulder. Two cameras dangled from straps around her neck, the old Leica M6 and the beloved Canon. She was a small woman with a lithe gamine body, delicate wrists, and slender ankles, but she’d gotten used to lugging heavy pieces of equipment long ago. Nowadays, she was traveling lighter, stuffing her black-and-white cartridges into the pockets of her red barn jacket.
She moved out from behind the Dumpster and started up the block, feeling the full warmth of the autumn sun on her face.
“Hola!”
she called out, flicking long straight raven-black hair over her shoulder.
The Aztec warrior with the Beatle mop stared down the block at her, moving his eyes from her face down to her camera and then back up again. It was always interesting to see what her subjects would react to first—the woman or the camera.
“Que pasa?”
She drew closer, trying to look small and nonthreatening.
A few of the men regarded her curiously. Others slipped right to the back of the crowd, clearly not wanting the immigration authorities to see their photographs.
“You make a nice picture today?” The Aztec mop top smiled knowingly.
“Oh, you saw me?” She fiddled with the f-stop in embarrassment.
“I see you out here before. Why you want to take our picture?”
At close range, he had a young man’s face with an older man’s experience imprinted on it. A short brow, an Indian nose, Eskimo eyes with fine lines fanning out around them, windburned cheeks. A good photographic subject. Especially with the incongruous “Vassar” printed across the front of his sweatshirt.
“Perdón,”
she said.
“Mi español es muy patético.”
“Is okay. I know English very good.”
“I’m a professional photographer.” She glanced down at the Leica, making sure its lens cap was off as well. “My name’s Lynn Schulman.”
“Jorge.” He stopped and corrected himself. “George.”
He offered his hand with a polite little bow. She saw agitation spreading among the men behind him as the sun cleared the rooftops and the possibility of finding work faded.
“Where you from?” she asked.
“Guatemala.”
“Well, George from Guatemala, I’m doing sort of a special project,” she said. “I’m just going around town, taking pictures of different scenes.”
His chin drew back into the rest of his face as he struggled to understand her. It seemed so self-indulgent to explain that she was putting together a gallery retrospective, featuring pictures of her hometown then and now.
“See, I’m from Riverside,” she said. “This is my hometown. I was born here.”
“Ah.” He seemed to be looking at her through a smudged bulletproof partition.
“The textile factory where my grandfather used to work was right here. I used to ride past it on my bike all the time …”
Just keep talking. Find a way to connect. She’d long ago realized that her greatest gift as a photographer was her own responsiveness, the way people liked to see themselves in her eyes.
“See, I took all these photographs when I was a young girl growing up here,” she said. “And now I’ve moved back, so I want to take a whole new series. To show the passing of time …”
She sensed that she was losing him. A boy of about seventeen, with almond eyes and ebony hair as long and straight as hers, came over and started striking beefcake poses, showing off big brown muscles in an American-flag T-shirt with the sleeves slashed off. She left her cameras dangling around her neck.
“You know, if you don’t catch these things, they’re gone forever.” She stayed after him, riffing for all she was worth. “I mean, people forget, or their memories play tricks on them. A picture is at least something you can hold on to.
Comprende?
”
George turned his eyes into sideways dime slots, trying to find a reason to go along with her.