The Lightning Rule Read online

  Emmett didn’t recognize the arresting officers’ names, however he was acquainted with what they had done. It was referred to as “handling” an arrest, an activity that took place with the troubling regularity of a hacking cough that comes back again and again, portending some more serious illness. In the last year, two suspects had been shot by officers from the Fourth Precinct, the first during a routine traffic stop, the other after a search for contraband. Both incidents were labeled as “accidental weapons discharges.” A third suspect had died in custody under what the newspapers called “mysterious circumstances.” The real mystery was how the higher-ups kept the press from learning about the man’s crushed skull, care of a nightstick. Those were the reports that never made it to the Records Room: no file, no way to press charges.

  The abuse was needless, reprehensible, but Emmett’s hands were tied. His father used to say, “Keep your hands away from the moving parts or you won’t keep your hands.” That was the rule at the Westinghouse plant. Men lost fingers to the saws, wrenched their spines operating machinery, had arms crushed in presses. If they put themselves in harm’s way, they would get hurt. The same was true of the department. Emmett was being ostracized as it was, and making a stink would only worsen his situation. He had to keep his hands to himself.

  “They must’ve hurt Smith bad. The floor of the cell was covered with blood.” The memory made Nolan visibly queasy.

  Most local residents were too afraid to lodge complaints against the police for fear of harassment or retaliation, fretful of meeting a similar fate as the cabdriver. If someone did venture to make a formal statement, the investigation would be forwarded along the chain of command to the police director, Wallace Sloakes, who would determine if the case merited a departmental trial. Such trials were unique unto themselves because Sloakes alone sat as judge. A born salesman who happened to wear a badge, he was as dirty as he was undiplomatic, and of the seventy complaints of brutality received that year, Sloakes permitted three to be taken to trial. Only one officer was deemed guilty. The punishment was a reprimand and a three-day suspension. Even the chief magistrate of the municipal court had ceased hearing civil cases dealing with charges against policemen, claiming they needlessly clogged the courts. Anybody brave enough to file a complaint faced an impenetrable bulwark of policemen and city officials. The system favored the force, and that was as strong a deterrent as a billy club. Normally, there would be no recourse for a cabdriver carried in by his arms and legs and beaten in a holding cell. That night, there was.

  “I don’t know how they found out,” Nolan said. “I guess somebody saw Tillet and Donolfo wailin’ on the guy.”

  “They?”

  “Them. The people outside. They came pouring outta Hayes. You’d a thought it was a goddamn parade.”

  The Hayes Home Housing Projects was a sprawling, ten-building complex situated catty-corner from the Fourth Precinct. Cops were called there on a daily basis, and those reports constituted a sizable share of the station’s cases. Thirteen stories tall, the brick behemoths loomed over the neighborhood, a ramshackle stronghold punched through by windows set apart like arrow slots in a castle. Hayes had seen its share of battles—battles about the landlord’s lack of repairs, rampant burglaries, and drug pushers prowling the halls. Apparently, the tenants had brought the fight out into the streets.

  “Then that guy, that preacher guy, he came and demanded to see the cabbie.”

  “Who? Mose Odett?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. The one who’s always getting himself in the news.”

  Mose Odett was a self-fashioned activist from Hayes who wore secondhand three-piece suits and spoke to everyone as though he was on a podium. More a radical than a militant, he organized rent strikes and sit-ins to push for enforcement of housing codes in the tenement. Slumlords and councilmen alike cringed at the mere mention of Odett’s name, which was in the paper as much as the mayor’s, where he made a point of punctuating every interview with the phrase “police brutality,” whether it applied to the topic or not. Emmett respected Odett’s convictions, if not his showboating, and admired his antiviolence stance. He wondered if that stance had changed.

  “Did Odett get in?”

  “We got the word to let him through. Then the inspector gave Odett a bull horn and fifteen minutes to make everybody beat it.”

  Inspector Herbert Plout ran the Fourth Precinct. Twenty years on the force and a yielding personality had garnered him the position. A reed-thin man who moved his hands too much when he talked, Plout was as good as gum on the heel of a shoe when it came to a crisis. Emmett didn’t see him in the crowd. The inspector was presumably holed up in his office, having reports ferried to him from the front lines.

  “What happened when Odett—”

  A barrage of stones pummeled the station, interrupting Emmett midsentence. The hail of rocks and garbage thundered against the exterior walls. The precinct was under siege. Squeals of shattering glass made Nolan jump. The young patrolman’s eyes glazed, unable to regain his train of thought. Emmett grabbed Nolan’s sleeve to force him to focus. “Keep talking, Officer.”

  “Odett was preaching to everyone to go home. But they wouldn’t go. They shouted him down. They won’t go away. Why won’t they go away?” The kid was pleading for an answer Emmett didn’t have.

  A hush came over the room, and the bodies packed into the entrance hall parted. Police Director Sloakes was hacking a path through the melee, ordering officers aside. Someone had smuggled him in the back door, an indignity the image-conscious director would have resented if it weren’t for his own personal security.

  Nolan was staring along with everyone else. “Who’s that?”

  “A man whose acquaintance you’re better off not making.”

  Emmett had met Sloakes twice, two occasions too many. His fourth year on the force, Emmett had taken the civil service exam to become a detective and passed with only one error. In spite of his score, he needed Sloakes’s approval to advance. As director, Sloakes had the discretion to assign patrolmen to the Detective Division, and his inaugural act upon entering office was to shuffle the squads, inserting his croanies into the plainclothes and gambling details that raked in the most profit from their precincts. During Emmett’s first meeting with him, Sloakes paged through his personnel file with a sly grin, vaguely amused, then slotted him into the Robbery Division with nothing more than a handshake and a cryptic suggestion to do his best. Recently, Emmett had had his second meeting with the director. Sloakes called him in unexpectedly. He was advancing Emmett yet again. This time, inexplicably, up to Homicide. Emmett hadn’t requested the assignment. Robbery was simple, safe, and, in the Central Ward, there was a constant supply of cases. He would never have requested to be in the Homicide Division, however he couldn’t refuse the promotion. That seemed somehow fitting to Emmett. His Catholic morality made him feel as if he deserved the position for that exact reason—because he didn’t want it. Emmett had spent three weeks on the squad before bottoming out in the basement. He couldn’t blame Sloakes for that. Nevertheless, he preferred to stay off the director’s radar. Emmett eased toward the staircase and out of view.

  “What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here?” Sloakes bellowed. He had a bland face and worked hard to fake charisma that didn’t come naturally to him.

  Inspector Plout finally appeared, fawning over the director and trying to usher him to his office. “I went out and explained that the cabdriver was gone, that he’d been taken to the hospital. It didn’t help.”

  Plout whispered a postscript in Sloakes’s ear, to which the director shook his head adamantly and said, “No, damn it. These men should be outside. Around the building.”

  Suddenly, a Molotov cocktail exploded against the station’s facade. Emmett yanked Nolan behind him, and everyone hit the floor. A spray of orange flames licked the broken windows.

  “Get these men in helmets. I want a nightstick in every hand,” Sloakes barked while Plo
ut did his best to disappear into the wall. “Give me a perimeter. Where’s the fire department? Where are the damn fire trucks?”

  A band of officers brushed by Emmett and Nolan, going toward the supply room for the helmets and nightsticks, which they passed out bucket-brigade style. Contrary to an actual bucket brigade, neither would help quell the fires outside.

  “You coming?” Nolan asked, being swept into the receiving line.

  Emmett was about to reply when he was jerked by the arm and pulled up the stairs.

  “What do you think you’re doing here, Detective?”

  Lieutenant Declan Ahern couldn’t meet Emmett eye to eye even with an extra step between them, but he made up for the height difference in sheer presence. At fifty, he had a full head of bristled silver hair and a boxer’s flat-bridged nose. Born and bred in the city’s West Ward, where the Irish gangs and the police were one and the same, Ahern had to choose at a young age between being a criminal proper and being a cop. Emmett pictured him flipping a coin.

  “The desk sergeant called me.”

  “He shouldn’t have. You’re on restricted duty for striking an officer, remember?”

  The lieutenant took a dark delight in reminding him. During an argument, Emmett had punched another detective in his division, though that infraction was not the real grounds for his reassignment. The truth behind his demotion struck harder than any right hook and hit below the belt. Emmett knew it, and so did Ahern.

  “You ready to get out of the basement and back on a regular shift? Say the word. You’ve kept me waiting a long time, Martin, and I’m not one for waiting.”

  Men shouldered past them on the stairwell, forcing the lieutenant chest to chest with him.

  “How long can you wait? Huh, Emmett?”

  Being in the basement was like holding his breath. To come up for air, all he had to do was tell Ahern what he wanted to hear. On principle, Emmett couldn’t do it. He hemmed his mouth, holding on to the words to prevent them from prying out.

  “Fine,” the lieutenant said. “You started this. Until you have an answer for me, I’m gonna forget you’re alive.”

  Entombment in the Records Room with his career on hold indefinitely was no idle threat. Ahern didn’t make idle threats, only real ones. He let go his grip on Emmett’s arm, yet Emmett continued to feel it.

  “Go home, Detective. You’re no good to me here.”

  Emmett bit down on his anger and said nothing. Disobeying a direct order wouldn’t do him any good either. At that moment, he wasn’t much use anywhere or to anyone, especially himself.

  Sloakes was furiously motioning Ahern over and shouting to nobody in particular, “Put the windows in tomorrow morning and get this place cleaned up. Return to normal and don’t treat this as a situation. Because once you start treating problems as problems they become problems.”

  The main door to the station swung open, wafting in the scent of seared metal and the dying whine of sirens. Reinforcements had arrived. Patrolmen in yellow helmets wielding their newly acquired nightsticks went pouring outside, clubbing anyone within reach. Emmett was sucked into the swirling throng of men clamoring to get at the action, and for the first time in months, he left through the Fourth Precinct’s front entrance. The lieutenant had made it clear that this was not his problem. Emmett had problems of his own.

  Fire trucks were blocking off the end of Livingston Avenue. Lines of hoses crisscrossed the asphalt and hydrants gushed on both sides of the street. The abandoned car was shrouded in flames, its tires fuming. Several trash cans had been lit too. Emmett was pinned between the precinct and the snarl of cops flailing nightsticks to thresh back the crowd. People fled into the Hayes projects and scattered along Springfield Avenue, hurling stones at the fire trucks as they ran. A teenage boy threw a brick through the plate glass window of a nearby liquor store, then another picked up a pipe and swept aside the jagged shards that framed the hole. Three more climbed in the window, raiding the shelves. Soon others were following suit, smashing windows and flooding into stores. Some of the patrolmen spotted the looters and took off after them, creating a gap for Emmett to slide through.

  He cut around the side of the station, glass crunching under his shoes as he hugged the walls, sticking to the shadows. He was afraid of being mistaken for a looter. The tendency would be to attack first. Questions would come later, if at all.

  Rounding the street corner, Emmett knocked into a woman cradling stolen fifths of liquor in her arms. “Sorry,” she mumbled, her politeness a stark contrast to the chaos. With the alcohol held tight, she sped away, glass bottles clinking, and vanished into a plume of smoke.

  From his car, Emmett watched firemen battling to douse the blazing abandoned car. Water collected in the potholes in the road where the old cobblestones showed through, reflecting the flames in a mirror image, and making it seem as if the fire was burning in every direction. Emmett feared it soon would.

  FOUR

  The house was dark when he got home. The television hissed static. It was late, and the stations had gone off the air. Even with the windows open, the heat inside was intense, almost audible, like the sizzle emanating from the TV screen.

  Emmett went into the dining room. Edward’s bed was empty, undisturbed since Emmett made it that morning. His initial impulse was to call to Edward, then he remembered his brother’s mocking imitation earlier that evening. He headed into the kitchen to look for him instead.

  The cupboard above the sink hung open. The bourbon was gone. Two wire hangers had been unwound and twisted together into a contraption to reach the cabinet handle and hook the bottle. The device sat, discarded, on the counter.

  The screen door was ajar. Outside, Edward was splayed across the porch next to his overturned wheelchair. The empty bottle of Jim Beam lay beside him in a puddle of vomit.

  “Christ, no.”

  Emmett rushed to him and checked for a pulse in Edward’s neck. The skin was warm to the touch. Beneath it pumped the rhythm of his brother’s heart, steady as the breathing Emmett finally heard over the drumming in his ears. He would have cursed Edward, except Emmett didn’t swear. He didn’t smoke or drink either. He had purchased the bourbon prior to his expulsion to the Records Room, thinking it might aid in his debate regarding whether to give in to Ahern, but he couldn’t bring himself to taste it, not a drop. The rules and rigors of his Jesuit seminary training were reflex, irrepressible. Taking the Lord’s name in vain was Emmett’s one, occasional slip.

  Fear and fury deflated into exhaustion. He righted Edward’s wheelchair, got a dishrag from the kitchen, and wiped the vomit from his brother’s face. Edward didn’t stir even as Emmett lifted him from under the armpits and hauled him to bed. As his brother’s heels dragged limply across the floor, lines from Saint Ignatius’s Prayer for Generosity droned in Emmett’s mind. To give and not to count the cost. To fight and not to heed the wounds. To toil and not to seek for rest. To labor and not to ask for reward.

  A scholarship to Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City had been Emmett’s ticket out of Newark. Entering the priesthood after graduation was a pardon from a thirty-year sentence of cutting parts at Westinghouse like his father or working the bottling line at Anheuser-Busch. At the time, a life of servitude was a small price for escape. His parents had been beyond proud that he had chosen to become a priest, especially his mother, who believed her years of devotion had at last paid off. That pride shriveled when Emmett left the monastery and turned his back on the church. For that, he felt he paid his own price. He was still paying.

  Edward was heavy, though he was getting lighter. The muscles in his legs were wasting, the knees growing knobby, the calves thin. He wouldn’t eat. He would only drink. He could forget about the wheelchair was when he was drunk and when he slept. So Emmett would let him sleep.

  He settled Edward into bed, making sure his legs were uncrossed to maintain circulation, and pulled a sheet over him. In that weather, the sheet was unnecessary, yet putting his br
other to bed uncovered seemed wrong somehow. Emmett shut off the television and felt his way to the staircase in the dark, running his hand across his father’s lounge chair to get his bearings. As he climbed the stairs, he was careful to forgo the steps that creaked in spite of the fact that, in his present state, nothing would wake Edward.

  Emmett’s bedroom had originally been his parents’. For weeks after he inherited the house, he slept in his childhood bedroom in his old bed, a tiny twin, with his feet hanging off the end. He couldn’t sleep where they had slept. It wasn’t until he moved their mattress into the garage and brought over the queen-size bed from his old apartment that he could finally change rooms.

  He undressed in the dark, peeling his sweat-dampened shirt from his body, and folded it for the laundry, then he knelt on the floor to pray as he did each night, hands clasped atop the bed. When he was a novice at the monastery of Saint Andrew’s on the Hudson, his mattress had been filled with straw and propped on a steel frame cot. Beneath his pillow lay a foot-long whip made of braided white cords and thin chains. That was where all the members of the novitiate kept their whips. There was no whip under Emmett’s pillow anymore, only a memory that stung.

  Every Monday and Wednesday, a bell would ring at bedtime, a call to the novitiate class to remove their shirts, take up their whips, and flagellate. Flogging one’s self for the duration of an Our Father was mandatory. The pain was marginal compared to that inflicted on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, when the inch-and-a-half width of the whip’s chain was to be tied around the thigh, its wire prongs driven into the skin for a span of three hours. If wrapped too loosely, the chain would drop to the floor with a telltale thud. Numbness set in if it was strapped too tight. All the while the prongs dug into the flesh, restricting the wearer’s gait to an awkward hobble and turning sitting into a torture akin to a tourniquet. The chain was a constant reminder that obedience equaled pain. The red welts it imparted were evidence that a true Jesuit never forgot Jesus’ pain, that a true Jesuit ignored his own.