The Witness Read online

  Marty Ginsburg was not smiling. He had been in Reardon’s squad long enough to know that when Mr. Reardon walked through the squad office and directly to his own office without breaking stride, it was a morning to be very careful. And very official.

  “Yes, sir?” he inquired politely.

  “Where the hell is Stoney?” Reardon’s hand swept above the disarray of his desk, then indicated the entire room. “You heard from him, or what? He taking a day off or what?”

  “Stoner called in about twenty minutes ago, Mr. Reardon.”

  “That was damn nice of him. Where is he?”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly say ...”

  Reardon’s hand moved roughly over his face in two quick motions, from his forehead to his chin, then up again, his fingers pushing through his thick, short red hair. His eyes, a clear amber, were very still and his voice was very cold. “Well, what exactly did he say or do you want me to play twenty questions and try to guess?”

  Marty self-consciously tried to flatten his stomach so that the strain of material across his middle would not be too noticeable. “Stoney called about twenty minutes ago and said to tell you that something unexpected came up and that he had to look into it. And that he would be in touch with you as soon as he checked it out.” Reardon stood still, not even blinking, and Marty impulsively offered a quick commentary. “He sounded kind of funny, Mr. Reardon.”

  Reardon’s head moved slightly. “He sounded kind of funny? Amusing, you mean?”

  Ginsburg wiped his forehead and tried to push the heavy dark hair back into place. “No, sir. He sounded—like something was really wrong. You know.”

  Reardon didn’t know and there were too many possibilities for him to begin guessing. “You and Ferranti got that report ready for me? You’re working on that parking-meter thing, right?”

  Detectives Ginsburg and Ferranti had spent four days interviewing various coin collectors, field supervisors, minor executives and major executives relative to a missing sum of money due to the City of New York. They had been overwhelmed by the intricacies of a bookkeeping system that seemed to provide no checks or balances.

  “We’re working on it right now, Mr. Reardon. Boy, what a screwy setup those guys have. I’d say the shortage could range all the way up to a quarter of a million bucks during the last two years.”

  “How about saying it on paper,” Reardon told him shortly.

  “Yes, sir.” He headed for the door, regretting that neither he nor Ferranti was a very good typist.

  Reardon consulted his watch. “You heard from Opara yet?”

  “No, sir, but she’ll probably be buzzing in any minute.” It was a routine attempt to cover for a squad member, but Reardon’s eyes were like two glints of fire and Marty left the office quickly.

  Reardon systematically went through the stacks of material on his desk, quickly scanning those things with which he was familiar, scrawling an illegible “R” in the upper right-hand corner of those reports which he considered to be complete, drawing large jagged question marks in the margins of papers that did not satisfy him. He felt a muggy draft of air aimed directly at the back of his neck; the air conditioner was making some progress after all.

  He opened the second drawer of his desk and rested his feet on it, leaning well back in his chair. Rather than cleaning his smudged horn-rimmed reading glasses, he pushed them up onto his forehead and scowled at a sheaf of yellow lined papers. He had forgotten about the lecture he was scheduled to present to the National Conference of Law Enforcement Officials next week. He read the first few paragraphs out loud, then balled up the entire wad of papers and tossed them against the wall behind him, feeling some slight satisfaction when he heard them drop into the wastebasket. He wondered why the hell he ever let himself get drawn into these conferences—especially summer conferences. All those police chiefs and public prosecutors and public defenders from small cities and towns all over the country, arriving en masse surrounded by dowdy wives and damp sweaty kids, descending on New York in the middle of a heat wave. Like hell they were interested in “New Aspects of Law Enforcement: How Close an Interpretation of Recent Supreme Court Rulings?” What they wanted was to take Circle Line tours, see television shows, have specially reserved seats at Radio City Music Hall, gape from the top of the Empire State Building, and eat roast beef instead of creamed chicken at the final banquet. His wife had stopped attending these things a long time ago. Reardon swallowed the last tepid mouthful of coffee from the ten-cent mug that was distinguished by the red marker legend: “I Am the Boss.” His wife had stopped a lot of things—a long time ago. He consulted his watch, then jammed the intercom lever. “Any fresh coffee out there?”

  He waited for the coffee, rather than an answer. When a faint tap sounded at his door, he didn’t look up. It would be Ginsburg with the coffee. He slid his cup across the desk, then raised his eyes.

  Detective Stoner Martin was a tall, hard-muscled man whose appearance at any given moment could be described as “neat”; even if an assignment called for him to be dressed in torn or faded workman’s denims, something about Stoner, his style, his way of holding himself, gave him a particular distinction. He was a dark-skinned Negro with an intelligent face and a low-pitched voice.

  Reardon forgot his annoyance after his first glance at Stoner. He put his cup down and watched as the detective slumped into the chair before his desk. When he lit the cigarette that had been between his lips from the moment he entered the room, his hand trembled.

  Reardon stood up, concerned. “Hey, Stoney—what’s up?”

  Stoner Martin raised his head. “They got my boy,” he said quietly.

  Reardon’s mouth opened and he felt a numbness along his throat and down into his chest. “Johnnie?” he asked, thinking of Stoner’s son.

  Slowly Stoner shook his head. “No. Not Johnnie. My other boy: Rafe Wheeler.” He raised a long index finger, held it in the center of his forehead. “Pow. Right between the eyes.”

  FIVE:

  WILLIAM EVERETT SPOONED THE heavy oatmeal from his dish to his mouth with the precision of a man who did things according to an irreversible plan. One large dish of oatmeal, heavily laced with honey and stirred with cream, preceded by four ounces of fresh orange juice and followed by one slice of buttered toast and hot sweet cocoa, was the breakfast he had consumed every day of his life for the last forty years. It was, he maintained, the reason for his perfect health at age sixty-one and directly responsible for the successful delivery of the United States mail, day after day, regardless of the season, in that particular area of Brooklyn which was the responsibility of postman William C. Everett, Sr.

  William C. Everett, Jr., had abandoned the gluey breakfast which, his father insisted, had contributed not only to his son’s lean physical stamina but had somehow mysteriously seen him through high school and college and through two years of Columbia Law School.

  The silence in the Everett kitchen, interrupted only by eating sounds, was not the customary, considerate silence among three people who were comfortable and contented in each other’s company. It was a tense silence this morning, as it had been every morning this week, and it was to be interrupted at any moment by angry words. Lucinda Everett tried not to watch the two men, but this was impossible, and her glances, first at the stoic face of her husband as he concentrated on his breakfast, then at the controlled calmness of her son, made her want to cry out, to rush toward each of them. But Lucinda quietly sipped her tea and said nothing, waiting for the moment when her husband would scoop up the last spoonful, then place the spoon neatly in the emptied dish.

  Billy, at twenty-two, was so like William in appearance, but Lucinda could not pinpoint the source of his intensity. The stubbornness, yes; but William’s had been a slow, deliberate, mule-patient stubbornness, and she knew, though William would not—could not—admit it, that he, too, was frightened and puzzled by their son’s determination.

  As the spoon hit the dish and the dish was pushed
toward the center of the table, William looked up and it began, as she had known it would.

  “So, you’re going to get yourself arrested today,” he said.

  Billy put his cup soundlessly on the saucer, his fingers clenching the handle tightly. He moved his chair back and his eyes met his father’s. “Pop, please. Can’t we let it go?”

  “Going to get yourself arrested,” the older man said wonderingly, as though this were the first time he had ever considered the situation. “Going to take four years of college and two years of law school and put it all right on down the drain.” He shook his head over the strangeness of his son.

  “Pop, every morning and every night for a week, you’ve said what you’ve had to say, I’ve said what I’ve had to say. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Nothing’s changed? Nothing’s changed? Everything’s changed. Every damn thing in this house has changed!”

  It wasn’t the unexpected loudness of her husband’s voice that frightened Lucinda, terrified her. It was the fact that for the first time in thirty years of marriage she had heard her husband swear.

  “Everything in the world is changing, Pop. Things don’t change all by themselves. People have to make them change. I have to make them change. Can’t you understand that?”

  The older man stared at the empty oatmeal dish for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. When he looked up, Billy saw a face he had never seen before. It was an expression Lucinda had hoped never to see again. His voice trembled and he spoke with great effort. “You listen to me, boy. You just listen to me, you great world changer, you young damn fool! You see this hand? You see the color of this hand and the color of this arm and the color of this face?”

  Billy felt his breath catch inside his throat and he could neither inhale nor exhale. He sat fascinated as his father clutched at himself, one hand tearing at an arm, plucking at hard leathery cheeks.

  “Every day of my life, for more than sixty years, this is what I’ve seen in the mirror and this is what I will see until the day I die. You the only black man in this house? You the only black man raising up his people—fighting the hurts? What you know about it? Dear Jesus, what you know about it?”

  He lapsed into old patterns of speech which his son had never heard before but which Lucinda remembered from some terrible time, long before their son had been born.

  “You born and raised here in this nice house in Brooklyn and you grew up here in this nice house and your playmates—be they white or black—all welcome here and you welcome in most of their homes, so what you know about it?” The large dark fingers clenched into a fist which pounded the table so violently that the dish rattled and seemed about to fly into the air. “You think carrying your signs and singing your songs and lying yourselves down and getting arrested is the way? You think your father and your mother never did nothing in their lives?”

  “Pop, no, really—”

  William cut his son off sharply. “No, you shut your mouth and listen to me now and I’m going to tell you what you don’t know. You fool boy. We waited to have you, all those years, till we could afford this house, and we bought this house before you were born, when your mama was carrying you and we were the first. It wasn’t like it is now with agencies to call up and them sending all the fancy college men over with their writs and their civil rights saying nobody could deny us. No, sir. It was your mama and me and we stuck it out and her carrying you and half crazy with what they would do next.” The old man’s eyes were glazed, cast back upon things he had never forgotten but never before revealed. “With that telephone ringing and those filthy mouths whispering and screaming things at us, and paint smeared all over the steps and windows crashing in at night.” He stopped speaking abruptly and a change came over him. His face relaxed, his body seemed to grow larger, straightening from the base of his spine to his neck and shoulders. His voice was normal now, quiet, controlled, and Billy, looking at his father’s face, had never loved him more than at that moment. “We went through it, boy, every day of our lives. I went out that door and walked down that street with my head up and I pretended I didn’t see the words painted on our front walk and pretended I didn’t see that the little flower bed your mama had planted was all tore up and messed with garbage and excrement. I pretended I didn’t see the signs in the windows of most houses on this block, big, hand-printed signs, all the same: THIS HOUSE FOR SALE—NIGGER NEIGHBORHOOD. We got through those days and some of them moved away and a few more black families moved in and we learned how to make it, just by being decent people and working hard. We just lived our lives, and by the time you got into school it had eased up and you never really knew anything about it. Not really.”

  Billy did not look at his father or his mother. He could not, because his eyes were hot with tears and he couldn’t trust his voice. Not that he would ever tell them what neither of them had ever known: the small things that he had lived with, pressing them back deep inside himself, the things his outraged love and sensitivity would never let him reveal. Why do I have to wear a white shirt and tie every day, not just on assembly day, like the other boys? Why isn’t 95 on a math exam good enough, just because some other kid got 97? Why do I have to take violin lessons from a private teacher as well as the free lessons the school gives? Why do I have to be home, in the house, under your eyes, by eight o’clock, even in the summer? What’s so different about me?

  All the small things, eating on him through his childhood, unspoken and unmentioned, until he understood, and then it twisted inside of him until he came to terms with it: his own terms. He had finally formed his own image and could no longer spare them pain and anguish, because he had to be his own man. And do things in his own way now.

  His hands slid along the table and reached for each of them and they sat for a moment in an exhausted silence, their hands joined. “Pop, I know.” Quickly he amended his statement. “Okay, I don’t really know and I owe that to you. To you and to Mama, what you took on for me. That was your way and your fight and you met it head on and I don’t know if I would have had your kind of courage. But that was your part of it, and now this is my part of it.”

  His father pushed his hand away at the same moment that his mother tightened her grasp. There wasn’t anger in his father’s gesture or in his voice. There was something close to despair. “But if you kick it all away now, Billy—if you throw away everything we did—then what was it all about? Why did Mama and I go through it, to have you toss it all away?”

  His mother spoke for the first time. “Billy, you get arrested and you’ll never get admitted to the bar. Your papa and I—that’s what it’s all been for. You wanted the law ever since you was just a little feller in the junior high and you never once changed your mind. You kept in that direction and we been with you all the way. You get arrested and get a record against you and you can’t never get admitted to the bar to practice law. You know that better than we do.”

  Billy released her hand, pushed his chair back and stood up; it was time to go. “There are times when a man has to think in larger terms. When you have to think outside of just ‘me-mine.’” He saw his father’s head snap up and kept his voice soft and even. “These are different times, Pop. People are joining together now, into organizations, into conferences, into committees. Not just one voice calling out, asking, pleading. Not just one man walking down a hostile street, pretending not to see, pretending not to know. But a larger force, moving together, getting laws passed, getting public opinion with us, touching the conscience, because we’re not pointing and saying ‘for me, just for me and mine.’ We’re saying ‘for all of us.’ Now, for all of us!”

  William Everett was silent. There was nothing more to say. He drank his lukewarm cocoa and ate his hard, crisp toast, shaking off his wife’s attempt to prepare some fresh breakfast. He would not look up at his son, whose hands pressed hard into his shoulders. He could not look up at him.

  Lucinda held Billy’s face between her hands, kissed him briefly on both chee
ks then released him. “Take care of yourself, Billy,” she said.

  There was nothing more a woman could do. A man had to make his choices and a woman had to wait and pray. The silence in the kitchen was interrupted by the crunching, chewing noises as William mindlessly ate the stale toast. Lucinda lifted her face from the sink filled with dishes. She moved the starchy sheer organdy curtains to one side and watched the tall straight figure of her son moving down the front walk to the sidewalk. He bent suddenly, and in the glare of the sunlight she had difficulty seeing what it was that had stopped him. Then as her son stood up, she saw their big orange cat roll in the sunlight, his paws languidly stretching.

  She watched Billy as he moved, easy and proud like his father, down the street of his home, and for some reason he stopped, turned back, and looked directly toward the window. Lucinda knew he couldn’t possibly see her; the window was small and the sun was directly in his eyes. As her son stood and faced his home, then continued on his way, Luanda’s heart seemed to empty of all life and fill unexpectedly and painfully with a terrible and certain knowledge: She would never see Billy walk down this street again.

  SIX:

  RAFE WHEELER, WHOSE LIFELESS body had been summarily collected and transported to the city morgue, had not been a police informer. He had been, for the thirteen months immediately prior to his death, a police officer.

  The Police Commissioner, a bland, mild man in his middle fifties, held the silver patrolman’s shield in the palm of his hand for a moment, regarding it without expression. Then he placed it on his desk beside a folder of material relating to Patrolman Rafe Wheeler. “A shame,” he said for the third time, fingering a photograph that had slipped from the folder. “A good-looking boy.”

  First-grade Detective Stoner Martin did not raise his eyes from the edge of the Commissioner’s desk. He didn’t care to see the sincere effort the man was making to recall some faint vestige of the boy he had sworn into the Department in this very office. It had been a private ceremony, witnessed by the Chief of Detectives, Supervising Assistant District Attorney Casey Reardon and Detective Martin. Only Stoner Martin had ever seen the boy or heard his voice after that day.