Burt stood to the right of the door with his back flat against the grubby wall and waited until his heart stopped pounding. The nearest working light on the open balcony of the housing project was a cracked florescent fixture ten feet away that flickered and buzzed weakly, casting an evil greenish light. Inhaling deeply through his nose, he held his breath for a count of three and then exhaled slowly through his mouth, mentally commanding himself to relax as he did so. Finally he was ready. Reaching out cautiously he knocked on the apartment door with the butt of his nightstick. He was proud to see that his hand wasn’t trembling a bit.
Instantly the door was flung open and a hulking giant of a man stood wedged in the opening, silhouetted against the room light. He was wearing stained and rumpled khaki trousers and a dingy T-shirt. Burt noticed that the wan light of the living room, combined with the flickering florescent, rendered the black slabs of the giant’s face in sinister chiaroscuro. Yellow eyes regarded him balefully.
It was at times like this that Burt wished he had stayed in art school instead of joining the police force to “learn about life.”
“Sir, would you please step out into the hall? I would like to ask you a few questions.”
Without warning the giant began blubbering like a naughty boy caught in the act. “I should’na done that to that por’ little girl,” he sobbed.
Jerking his pistol from its holster Burt pointed at the monster.
“Sir! You have the right to remain silent! You have the right to an attorney. If…”
“Is this the fucker?”
Out of the corner of his eye Burt could see the head of a small black woman appear in the stairwell and grow into the uniformed figure of his partner, Violet. From two floors below the sound of women wailing came floating up the stairwell.
“…you can not afford one…” Burt doggedly continued reciting, determined not to give some shyster lawyer a loophole to get this bastard off because he had not followed proper procedure.
The giant wasn’t listening. He kept crying and detailing just exactly what he “should’na done” to that little girl with gut-twisting specificity.
“So much detail!” Burt thought, suppressing a shudder.
Locked away in a tiny garret in the back of Burt’s mind the artist in him noticed how the long streams of tears glittered in the flickering light against the ebony backdrop of the giant’s face. “What in the hell am I doing here?” the artist wailed.
From a long way off Burt heard his voice finish the Miranda warning and announce, “You are now under arrest.”
Looking like a tiny tugboat trying to maneuver an ocean liner, Violet turned the giant to face the graffiti-daubed wall and, taking care not to step between the prisoner and Burt’s gun, cuffed the monster’s hands behind his back, and then began frisking him.
“The ambulance driver said the girl is probably going to live, what’s left of her.,” said Violet. “More is the pity. I’ve radioed it in and dispatch says that city detectives are going to meet her and her momma at the hospital. As usual, they left it for the Housing Police to take out the garbage.”
More to distract himself from the lurid details the giant kept spewing than for any concern for the monster’s rights, Burt started reciting the Miranda warning again.
“So many horrible details!” he thought.
He’d gotten to the third recital by the time Violet finished her frisk and turned the cuffed giant around to face her. Stretching up to the limit of her reach, the tiny woman grabbed the monster’s ear and pulled his face down to within inches of her own.
“You good for nothing nigger,” the little black lady hissed, “If yo momma knew what you been doing she would turn over in her grave.”
“My momma ain’t dead,” sniffled the giant.
Whack! The giant’s head snapped back from the recoil of Violet’s openhanded slap.
“This’ll kill her!”
Violet radioed in the arrest on her shoulder mike and then, with wordless agreement, the two officers started walking their prisoner towards the stairwell. Although it was thirteen floors to the parking lot they didn’t even consider taking one of the project’s two antique elevators.
Reeking of every effluent the human body was capable of, the elevators were moving death traps. His first week on the job Violet had explained to Burt how children of the project would often pry the doors of the shafts open one story above the elevator and then ride up and down between the floors on top of the cars.
It was also a favorite haunt of the more daring young hoodlums in the neighborhood who would jump back and forth between the moving cars as they passed each other and watched through cracks in the ceilings until a lone victim got in. They would then trigger the emergency stop between floors, open the escape hatch and jump into the car to rob or rape the occupant.
By now the whole housing project was buzzing like an angry beehive with the news of what had happened to the little girl The Yerba Buena Plaza Annex, or “Pink Palace” as the residents called it, was a huge squared-off horseshoe of a building, and the nameless architects who had designed it had decreed that instead of hallways their masterpiece of urban planning would have open balconies.
From where the two officers were standing, on the topmost story of the side facing the inner courtyard, they could see sullen knots of muttering residents gathered on every floor. Although most of the residents would rob their neighbor’s apartment in a heart beat or club a friend in a dark stairwell for their welfare check, there were some crimes that even they would not tolerate and the giant had committed one of them. Burt and Violet knew that they, and their prisoner, were safer out in the open.
Holstering his gun, Burt took hold of the chain linking the cuffs with his left hand and placed his right hand on the prisoner’s shoulder to him steer with.
“Let’s go.”
As they approached the rusting, paint-flecked iron pipe-railing of the balcony Violet turned a wild look on Burt. “Let’s throw him over,” she said.
Burt forced a chuckle. “That would be a quick way to get him to the parking lot but the paper work would be hell.”
“All you have to do is say that he tried to make a run for it and tripped.”
Startled, Burt looked his partner full in the face. “Surely you are kidding.”
Burt waited, a forced grin on his lips, for Violet to finish the lame joke with their traditional, “Don’t call me Shirley,” line, but instead he felt ice slide down his spine as he looked into her eyes and realized that she most definitely was not kidding.
Still trying to keep things light, Burt nailed the fake grin firmly in place but his eyes knew he was lying and refused to play along.
“I don’t know if you have noticed these nifty blue suits we have on, Violet” he quipped, “but we are police officers. You know--the good guys? We can’t go around flinging people off buildings simply because we don’t like them. Before you know it people would start to talk.”
Little happy-go-lucky Violet, the only officer on the force who wore pink butterfly berets in her hair while on duty and carried a bottle of soap bubbles complete with bubble wand on her gun belt to entertain the neighborhood children, gave the giant the sort of look a mongoose gives a cobra just before the two step outside and finish things.
With a voice that could etch steel, the single mother of three girls said, “This nigger is a complete waste of skin. He’s got no business breathing the same air as decent folks. We would be doing him a mercy to put him down like the rabid dog that he is.”
Burt’s grin faded in horror. “You are out of your fucking mind,” he whispered. “I don’t plan on going to jail just because you are feeling maternal.”
Violet rounded on him like a rabid
“Who in the hell do you think you are you fucking goody-two-shoes white boy? This is all just a game to you ain’t it? You come up in here with your suburban values and your fucking artistic soul thinking you are going to play tourist in the ghetto for a few years, see life in the raw for a while, and then go back to the ’real’ world with a bunch of interesting stories for your artistic friends and inspirations for your paintings. Well, I got news for you motherfucker! This ain’t
Burt stepped back from Violet’s fury as though he had been slapped. Despite himself, he felt tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. He had always considered Violet more than a partner. He thought she was his friend.
When he had started in the projects all the residents treated him with naked hostility and fear, but Violet had quietly had a word with some of the more important women in the building and soon hostility changed to wary acceptance. Burt knew better than to relax his vigilance, but he at least felt he was making progress.
He and Violet had spent many long, cold hours of the night in conversation as they patrolled the filthy corridors and reeking stairwells. Burt had tried to talk of art, and books and the world of ideas while Violet had tried to teach him the difference between “book smart” and “street smart.” Although she would have, as she put it “slapped the taste out of his mouth” if she knew he was thinking, it he had always considered her his Virgil, his “native guide” to the various rings of hell that were the projects.
“You ain’t seen what this fucker done or maybe you would grow some balls and act like a man,” Violet screamed. “You don’t gotta’ live in a place like this neither. When you’re done playing at being a cop you can chuck this job and go back to you nice, safe, white neighborhood in the suburbs with nothing but a few memories of the quaint colored folks you met.”
Violet’s angry words poured in a searing torrent over him. After a while she ran out of breath and just stood with her fists on her hips glaring at him.
Burt turned the giant around and, pointing him in the direction of the stairwell, started walking him towards it. The giant obediently shuffled along in the direction he was pointed, chin on chest, muttering lurid details of his crime to himself. His huge, callused bare feet made slapping sounds on the damp concrete of the balcony.
“Gauguin,” Burt muttered.
“What?” screamed Violet. “What the fuck did you say?”
“Gauguin. The painter that went to
The frosty night air grew colder. For a moment Burt was afraid of what Violet might do in her current state of mind. Looking over his shoulder to where she stood he could see her hand had drifted to rest on the butt of her nine millimeter service pistol. The skin between his shoulder blades itched in anticipation, but nothing happened. Violet just stood there with her mouth half open, staring at him in utter disbelief. Finally she heaved a disgusted sigh.
“You’re fucking unbelievable. You know that?”
Taking his right hand off the giant’s shoulder Burt opened the door leading to the stairwell and held it with his foot as he steered the giant through the opening. Like most of the light bulbs in all the stairwells of the building this one was missing, no doubt removed by some enterprising mugger in order to help stimulate business.
It was standard procedure for the other officer to go ahead of the one in charge of a prisoner and light the way with a flashlight, but, given Violet’s mood, Burt didn’t think reminding her of this was such a good idea. Pausing halfway through the doorway, Burt called back over his shoulder to his partner.
“I know you are upset Violet, but I am serious. We can’t just take the law into our own hands. What kind of a world would it be if people went around taking the law in their own hands? Everybody his own judge, jury and executioner? It would be chaos!”
Silence!--He waited a minute for Violet’s reply but she just stood where she was, glaring at Burt as though he was something nasty she had just discovered on the bottom of her shoe.
The giant kept adding gruesome details to his confession but Burt tried not to listen. It wasn’t as though the City Detectives would even look at any “evidence” collected by a Housing Authority cop. The City and
“Taking out the garbage,” thought Burt angrily. “That is all they think we are good for.”
He knew that the S.F.P.D. thought of their “brother” officers in the Housing Police as little better than glorified security guards and contemptuously dismissed any efforts they made at “solving” crimes. Burt grew angry as he thought about it.
“We are up to our necks in the shit every day, sudden death waiting for us around every corner, and they come in here and look at us as though we were cockroaches!”
Violet still hadn’t said anything. Burt sighed and pushed the giant towards the stairs letting the battered, paint-flecked-metal door swing shut behind him.
Instantly, the stairwell was plunged in darkness. Waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, Burt could see a gibbous moon peeking out from behind the gilded splendor of City Hall’s dome that reared in massive splendor only a few blocks from the forlorn squalor of the
“Gibbous moon,” thought Burt. “That’s just the sort of thing Violet would dismiss as ‘artsy fartsy bullshit.”
Not for the first time, Burt felt anger at having to hide his education, not only from the residents of the housing project but even from his own partner!
“I shouldn’t have to apologize for my education! It isn’t as though she couldn’t pick up a fucking book if she wanted to!”
The watery moonlight didn’t so much illuminate the stairwell as to simply give the darkness a little form and texture. Like a blind man trying to navigate a strange room without his cane, Burt groped his way forward through the blackness towards the deeper blackness of the stairwell. The giant’s bare feet had no trouble finding the steps and he started down them without hesitation, Burt inching along behind him.
The door behind him was flung open. The faint glow of the damaged florescent cast a wedge of illumination that seared as bright as a searchlight in the darkened stairwell.
“It would be a world a whole lot like the one you’re in right now,” Violet called down the steps towards Burt’s receding back. “My world!”
“What did you say?” called Burt over his shoulder.
Violet flicked on her MAGLite and followed her partner down the stairs. The huge police issue flashlight was heavy enough to serve as a truncheon and bright enough to pinion a suspect in its beam from a block away.
“You asked what sort of world it would be if people went around taking the law into their own hands, and my answer is that it would be a whole lot like the one you are in right now. It would be the sort of world where people are crammed into giant housing projects like cattle in a pen to stew in their own misery. It would be a world where the cops don’t come until you got a dead body on the ground and even when they do arrive all they do is clean up the mess and mutter to themselves about ‘the projects.’”
“That’s not true Violet.,” Burt protested. “After all; we are here.”
“That fucking proves it!” snapped Violet. “You can tell what kind of justice Black folk get by fact that it is only you and me here to deal with this monster. If it had been a white girl he hurt we would have S.W.A.T. on the roof plus five patrol cars and three news-crews in the parking lot down below and you fuck’n know it!
Look at that white college girl that gone missing on that island. She was on the news for a goddamn year! A black girl her same age went missing from this fucking building about the same time and it didn’t even make the local papers! Black folk don‘t get justice unless they take it for themselves.”
Burt stopped and turned his head to look at his partner but kept a firm hold on the giant‘s cuffs.
“You know something Violet? I have had a bellyful of your whining and blaming other people for the plight of Black folks! You might think I am some sort of artistic dilettante playing at being a policeman, but I have spent almost every night of the last year risking my life patrolling the hallways of this stinking dump so that the residents could be safe and you know it! How many nights have I patrolled this place alone because you wanted to stay by the heater in the guard-shack and keep warm?”
“You’re always whining about the white man this and the white man that but it’s not the white man that makes this project the stinking hell hole that it is. The people who live here do that all by themselves!”
“You can blame a man for knocking you down but you can’t blame him if you choose to stay down,” Burt said with the triumphant air of a Poker player slamming down four Aces.
Violet’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Nice line Professor. Who wrote it for you, some candy-assed white philosopher who learned about life out of books?”
“It was Malcom-X, which you would have known if you had read that book I gave you.”
The giant had been standing, sunk in a dull stupor, his chin on his chest, still mumbling lurid details of his crime. Without waiting for Violet to reply Burt gave his prisoner a little shove to get him going and continued down the stairs.
He was burning with anger at the blatant unfairness of Violet’s remarks. She never gave him credit for anything! He may have had other motives when he had joined the force but he had seen and done plenty since then.
Night after night he had stood alone for hours in some murky stairwells that reeked of urine and vomit just so he could bust a drug dealer. He had waited in the stygian tunnel leading from the front parking lot to the inner courtyard so that he could catch the purse snatchers who had mugged tourists up the hill in Japan Town and then streaked down here on stolen bicycles to dispose of the evidence.
Once he had been severely injured trying to break up a domestic spat when the woman he was trying to save had jumped up off the floor where her boyfriend had been kicking her in the stomach, grabbed a knitting needle and stabbed him through the hand.
How dare Violet say this was all just a game! He wasn’t playing at being a policeman. Once he had faced down a knife-wielding junky who had been crazed on P.C.P. and he had broken up more fist fights than he could remember.
He had walked for hours in the icy rain whipped off the bay by chill winds or stood in the gloom of some upper floor balcony watching tendrils of pearlescent fog coiling around the Beaux Arts dome of city hall. He had patrolled on nights when the moisture from the damp air condensed into little ice crystals on the rusty, paint-chipped railings to the balconies as the moonlight trapped in their facets had made the smelly old building blaze as though it had been powdered with diamond dust.
He had..He had…He had just noticed that Violet was speaking again.
“You know as well as I do that this nigger ain’t never go’na be worth shit. If we’re lucky and they put him straight away he will do a few years in the can and then he’ll be back on the streets looking for another little girl. Animals like him don’t never change.”
Burt and his prisoner reached the bottom of the first flight of steps and turned right to start down the next one. As they did so the shadow cast by Burt’s body shifted and the beam from the MAGLite blazed silver on the cuffs pinning the prisoner’s enormous ebony paws. Was that dried blood under his nails?
The giant remained oblivious to Violet’s tirade. He dully shuffled along in which ever direction he was pointed, lost in his own world, mumbling his confession.
“The chances are that if we take him in tonight he will be out on bail before we come on shift tomorrow. And then what? He ain’t coming back here--them ‘men’ in the neighborhood would kill him…”
Burt couldn’t fail to notice the way Violet emphasized the word ‘men,’ and suppressed an angry retort.
“…but he will hole up somewhere. He’ll lie up in some alley or sewer or break into some abandoned warehouse. He don’t care. He can sleep in a hole in the ground and eat garbage or rats, and not give a damn cauz there’s only one thing he’s living for. And in a day or two he’s gona go hunt’in again. He’s a sick, twisted motherfucking animal and he has got to feed his hunger, just like any other junky--only thing is, this scumbag’s ‘fix’ is little girls.”
“You don’t know that,” Burt snapped. “You have never seen this man before in your life and yet you talk about him as though you knew him personally. Hell, we don’t even know if he’s guilty! All we have is circumstantial evidence.”
“Circumstantial evidence!” Violet screamed. “Circumstantial evidence! The motherfucker ain’t stopped confessing since we arrested him! Shit, he’s still confessing right now!”
“That only proves he attacked this one girl; your just making all the rest of that shit up so you can feel self-righteous about wanting to kill him.”
Burt and his prisoner reached the landing of the twelfth floor, turned to face the next flight of steps, and stopped to wait for Violet to catch up.
“You know something college boy? You’re plum et up with dumb ass! You think just because you survived in the ghetto for a year you know the ghetto, but you don’t know shit! You is only alive because I got your back.” Violet was working herself into a fury.
“You think you seen some shit but you ain’t seen nothing! You didn’t have a sister snatched out her room at night or seen what was left of her after some animal had his way with her for three whole days! If you had you wouldn’t let an monster like this live any longer than it took to put a bullet to him.”
Suddenly the beam of Violet’s flashlight stopped moving and Burt looked up to see his partner holding the big MAGLite backhanded in her left hand with her right wrist crossed over the top in the regulation combat shooter’s stance. In her right hand nestled the blue-grey bulk of her service automatic--pointed at his prisoner.
Burt felt his blood go cold. The giant stood, dully oblivious of his surroundings, between Violet and himself, partially covering Burt with his huge bulk. Burt’s gun-hand was blocked from Violet’s view by the giant. He released his hold on his prisoner’s cuffs and gripped the butt of his pistol, loosening in its holster.
It was only then that he realized what Violet must have worked out for herself. Although the stairwell they were in was open to the outside it was blocked from the view of the people in the inner courtyard. The three of them were alone. There were no witnesses! Burt fought to keep his voice steady.
“Violet.” he said, speaking very slowly, in a non-challenging tone, as though talking to a crazy person he didn’t want to spook. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t worry, college boy. You ain’t gotta do nothing. Just step away from him and let me do what’s gotta be done. We’ll just say he tried to make a run for it.”
“I can’t do that Violet.”
“Sure you can. You don’t need this Burt. You ain’t a for real cop, you’re just playing at being a cop so that you can go back to the suburbs with your stories to impress your brainy friends and acting all worldly. You don’t want to die in some dark and stinking stairwell protecting some lowlife nigger. You just want to be legend in your own mind, back in your studio painting pictures and fucking college girls. Now step away from that animal so I can put him down.”
There was ice in Violet’s voice. The glare of the flashlight hid her eyes, but he could feel them boring into him. He fixed a steady stare where he thought they ought to be. “Not going to happen, Violet. If you want to shoot him you’re going to have to shoot me too.”
Burt’s heart stopped as he heard the metallic rasp of Violet thumbing back the hammer. Burt could not believe that Violet would really shoot him but he realized that he had pushed her into a corner and there was no way her pride would let her back down now. The problem was that Burt was in a corner too. He had meant what he had said. Violet might call him “artsy fartsy” or a “ghetto tourist” looking for experience, but what she was doing violated every principal he believed in. Who said artists were cowards?
The two officers stood frozen for what seemed an eternity. Burt had all but forgotten about his prisoner in his concentration on his partner, but suddenly the giant broke into a shambling run.
There was the crunch of glass as the giant’s bare foot came down hard on the shards of a broken beer bottle. His body convulsed in pain and he staggered sideways, hitting the rusted iron pipe railing with his full weight.
The pipe tore loose and, with his hands cuffed behind his back and no way to catch his balance, the giant tottered on the brink and started to roll over the side of the balcony. Wide yellow eyes stared back at Burt in frozen terror.
Without pausing to think about it Burt’s hand snaked out and caught the giant by his grubby trousers. With a grunt he heaved the big man to safety.
“Damn it Burt,” Violet roared “all you had to do was not catch the bastard. You didn’t even have to stain your lily white soul by acting like a man, you just fucking didn’t have to catch him and you even fucked that up!”
With a disgusted sigh Violet shoved her pistol back into her holster. “Fine, have it your own damned way, but mark my words, the next little girl this monster hurts is on your conscience!”
Burt took hold of the giant’s cuffs with a trembling hand and they started down the stairs again. Violet trailed behind, keeping a disgusted silence but lighting the way with her flashlight.
Flight after flight as they wound their way into the stinking darkness the giant kept up his droning catalogue of his crime. Burt tried not to listen, but now that Violet was maintaining a stony silence he could not avoid hearing what his prisoner was saying and he was starting to feel sick at all the details. Maybe Violet was right and the world would be a better place if they had just tossed this piece of garbage off the top floor.
It was all just too much.
“Too much,” thought Bert, “That’s it! There is just too much detail!”
How could one person possibly do that many horrible things to another person? It would have taken days to do all that!
Burt was so excited at his epiphany that he turned to say something to Violet but the words froze on his lips when he saw her sullen glare.
In the parking lot they found the “Mobil Assistance Patrol” van waiting for them.
The driver, a middle-aged black man with iron gray hair and the uniform of an S.F.P.D. sergeant took one look at Burt’s prisoner and snorted with disgust.
“You again!”
Burt could feel Violet’s icy stare on his back.
“You mean he’s attacked little girls before?” Violet said triumphantly.
The driver laughed.
“Shit no! Old Billy here wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Burt carefully avoided showing his partner even the hint of triumph.
“But he confessed!” sputtered Violet. “All the way down the fucking stairs he wouldn’t shut up, he just kept confessing!”
“Yeh, he does that,” said the sergeant removing Billy’s cuffs, “don’t ya, big fellow?”
He slapped Billy affectionately on the back.
“You see Billy here is what they call ’special.’ You know, a little short in the brains department? Well, some twenty years ago the city scraped some money together and sent Billy and a bunch of kids like him up to
Billy looked around at his surroundings dully, wiped his nose on the back of his arm and then stood with his chin on his chest and his arms hanging limply at his side.
“While he was gone some sick bastard raped, tortured, and murdered his little sister. Billy took it real hard. You see he figured that it was all his fault because he should have been there to protect her. That’s crazy of course, but ever since that, whenever he hears of some little girl getting attacked he immediately confesses to the crime. I don’t know where he comes up with all the details he throws in. I think he must watch cop shows on T.V.”
Gently raising the big man’s chin with his thumb the driver looked him in the eyes and said, “Now Billy, I want you to go on home and wait till your momma gets back. Do you hear me?” Billy nodded dumbly and shuffled off towards the stairs trailing a streak of blood behind him from his injured foot.
“And Billy you show that cut on your foot to your momma when she gets home so she can put a dressing on it, you hear?”
Billy didn’t look back but he waved his hand to show that he had heard.
“Billy’s momma owns that little barbecue joint over on
With another toothy grin he climbed into the van and drove away, leaving Burt and Violet alone in the darkened parking lot. They stood in awkward silence for a while and then Violet looked up sheepishly.
“You want to go 10/20M and grab some coffee?”
Burt looked his partner square in the eye for a long moment.
“You’re buying.”
