The Good Cop - Страница 3

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So I knocked, then held my breath.

The door was answered by a medium-height, slender African American woman with dark smudges under her eyes. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her feet were bare. She looked like she hadn’t slept that night. Or the previous night. Or, for that matter, the previous month.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Hi, I’m sorry to trouble you. I know this is a difficult time,” I said as apologetically as possible. “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m here to write a tribute to Darius.”

The word “tribute” was deliberate, of course. If I said I was there merely to write a “story,” there would still have been some doubt as to my intentions. I wanted to make it clear I was coming in peace.

“Oh,” she said, like this surprised her.

“I’m Carter Ross. Are you Mrs. Kipps?”

“Yes. I’m Noemi”-she pronounced it no-em-mee-“but call me Mimi. Everyone else does.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, opening the door a little wider.

And, just like that, I was in. I walked into a living room filled with older women, most of them substantially larger than Mimi, all of them staring at me, all of them black.

I always get a kick out of white people who complain that blacks are “obsessed” with race and talk about it too much. If those white people could, just once, walk into a room like this, where suddenly they were the Other Race, they’d understand the “obsession” just a little better. Because you know what? We can all say we’re color-blind, and we can claim that race doesn’t matter in an America that has elected a black president.

But that’s foolishness. Race matters. It mattered at my prep school, where in a student body of five hundred there were maybe fifteen black kids, thirteen of whom had been brought there to play football or basketball. It mattered at my alma mater, Amherst College, where we were all supposedly enlightened multiculturalists, yet we still fell back into the easy comfort of our groups, black, brown, white, and yellow. It matters in my workplace, where editors have been known to pair reporter and assignment based on skin color, simply because you just couldn’t send a white reporter to write Story X, or you really had to send a Hispanic reporter to do Story Y. And until some distant time many centuries from now when there is a truly American race-when we’ve all interbred enough that the races are no longer distinct-it will continue to matter everywhere else in our society, too.

So I was the white guy in the room. And not just any white guy. I’m a purebred WASP, straight off the not-so-hardscrabble streets of Millburn by way of tennis camp. My quick read told me Mimi didn’t have a problem with white guys. She had bought the “tribute” line. But these other black women were still undecided. They were eyeing me with a mix of curiosity and hostility, their protective instincts fully engaged.

“This is the man from the newspaper,” she announced. “He’s here to write about Darius.”

“I just want to be able to write about what kind of person he was,” I interjected, “tell some nice stories about him.”

Mimi proceeded to introduce me to the six women in the room, a series of aunties and cousins whose names I didn’t quite register. I’d get them later. I didn’t even have my notebook out to write them down. For now, it was more important to smile pleasantly, make good eye contact, and shake a hand if it was offered to me.

Then she led me around to the corner, where there was a crib, one of those portable Pack ‘N Play things. Inside, a shriveled-looking baby slept soundly.

“This is Jaquille,” she said. “Darius’s son. He’s five months.”

That explained the raccoon eyes Mimi was sporting. I thought she looked like she hadn’t slept for a month. She probably hadn’t, with this little guy in her life.

And I do mean little. Since I hadn’t entered the reproductive portion of my life-Tina’s entreaties having been unsuccessful-I didn’t know from babies. But this one looked awfully small.

“He was born two months premature,” Mimi said, reading my mind. “He weighed three pounds, four ounces. He was in the hospital the first two months, because of some stuff with his lungs. But he’s fine, now. He’s up to nine pounds.”

“He’s beautiful,” I said, which was a flat-out lie. Like most newborns, Jaquille looked like a spindly legged alien with a human diaper attached to him. But saying that didn’t seem like it would ingratiate me to Jaquille’s mother.

“Darius was so proud of him. We have a daughter who’s seven, and he loves her like any dad loves his little girl. But he always wanted a boy. He said a man’s gotta have a son. So we tried and tried. Darius only had one testicle.”

Now there was a piece of information that likely wouldn’t be making it into the next day’s paper.

“And we were wondering if maybe that had something to do with it,” Mimi continued. “We had him tested, and his count was pretty low.”

Yet another piece.

“But we kept trying and praying. I had just about given up, but then God heard our prayers and gave us a son. I always thought of him as my miracle baby.”

Mimi stared at Jaquille, while I furtively studied Mimi out of the corner of my eye. She had this calm about her that was almost eerie. A woman who loses her husband and is suddenly left to raise two children, one of them an infant, by herself? She ought to be oozing tears, snot, and despondence.

Instead, she was gazing down at her baby beatifically, like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance frieze. She must have still been in shock, the tragedy so new her mind couldn’t yet process it.

One of the aunties, the one sitting in the corner, picked up the dialogue where Mimi left off: “You should have seen Darius with that boy. He visited him in the hospital every morning after his shift ended. He would just go in there and talk and talk and talk. He’d say, ‘You gonna be a Eagles fan, just like your daddy. And you gonna root for the Sixers, just like your daddy. And we gonna watch baseball together. And I’m gonna teach you to catch a ball and throw a ball. And you’re gonna be real smart. And you’re gonna go to college. And your daddy is going to be so proud of you.’”

Mimi chimed in: “Darius said our boy came out small, but he was going to love him so much he couldn’t help but get big. He was just going to fill that little boy up with his love.”

I looked down at Jaquille, the erstwhile miracle, and tried to swallow the cantaloupe that was suddenly growing in my throat. Right then, I knew what my story was going to be. It would be written as a letter to Jaquille, to be read on the day he graduated from college. And it would tell him all about the father he never got a chance to know.

* * *

Over the next few hours-as a succession of relatives, friends, and neighbors wandered to the house to offer their respects-I learned about who that man was.

Darius Kipps was born in Camden and grew up in nearby Pennsauken. Both places were in South Jersey, which explained why he rooted for all those Philadelphia teams. His father had been a cop, too, putting in twenty-five years with the Camden PD and retiring with a trunk full of commendations, which told me a little something about the tree from which Darius had fallen. Camden has long ranked in the top ten as the toughest American city in which to be a cop.

As a teenager, Darius was a bit of a prankster but also a natural leader, so he became the ringmaster of a group of quasi-misfits, who liked to party a little too much. It didn’t sound like they were bad kids, by any stretch. But it was subtly explained to me there may have been a mailbox or two that succumbed to Darius’s idea of a good time. I also heard an account of how he organized a group of fourteen guys to lift a principal’s car and move it back to the Dumpsters behind school. The distraught man ended up reporting it stolen before someone finally let him in on the gag.

After Darius graduated high school, he tried a variety of jobs, none of which really fit him. And finally he went to school and got an associate’s degree in criminal justice: police work was in his blood, after all. He took the police exam and posted a high score, such that he had a number of job offers-well-qualified black candidates were always in demand from departments looking to improve their diversity. His family urged him to accept an offer from one of the cozy, suburban police departments, where he wouldn’t have to dodge the same dangers as his father.

But Darius wanted to be where the action was. He wanted to be where he felt he could do the most good. He chose Newark.

Smart and hardworking, with those natural leadership skills, he rose quickly through the ranks, never going long without moving up. After a few years on patrol, with his potential obvious to all, he earned his detective’s shield. A few years after that, he aced his sergeant’s exam and got that promotion, too. Lieutenant couldn’t have been far away.

He was the kind of cop who kept the scanner on at home and listened to it as background noise-the way some people keep the television on-just so he knew what his fellow officers were up to. And if he heard something that sounded like trouble and was close? He stored his gun and his shield by the door so he could grab them quickly on the way out. He had once nabbed a carjacker that way. It was the kind of commitment to the job that had earned him commendation after commendation, just like his old man.