American Gangster

4. Past Due

The next afternoon, gray but not as cold as some recent days, Richie stood with his ex-wife Laurie in a Newark park, where their five-year-old son Michael could play in a grassy area with other youngsters, and not be party to their discussions about his welfare and future.

Already their talk wasn’t going well, and when a jet screamed overhead and then faded away, the interruption was almost a relief; that Frank Lucas was on that jet, heading to the Far East, was a small irony Richie was not privy to.

“I’m sorry, babe,” he said.

Laurie gave him a sideways glare that told him he’d long since lost the right to call her that. She was only one of a dozen moms in the park today, but probably the best-looking, with her curly dark hair brushing her shoulders, and a peasant blouse and slacks indicating what was still a nice body.

“You could have told me sooner,” she said, watching their boy frolic with other kids, their laughter and screams tinged with the happy hysteria of childhood.

“I’m sorry.” He sighed, shrugged. “I know. But it’s the big exam. It’s what all my work’s been leading up to.”

“I don’t know, Richie.”

“Can’t be avoided.” His hands were in his pockets and he was rocking on his heels; his eyes took routine stock of those other moms — one of whom rivaled Laurie at that, a hot young blonde. Got knocked up in high school maybe, and popped one out. “Next weekend I’m open. Be able to take Mike, no problem.”

When he glanced back at his own wife, ex-wife, she was studying him the way a lab student eyes a slide with some squirmy thing on it, obviously aware he’d been sizing up the blonde competition.

Maybe that was why something else was in Laurie’s expression, too: not disgust exactly, more... weariness.

Somehow that was worse than disgust to Richie; anger, disgust, were strong responses, emotional responses. Now, after all the loving and hating and cooing and yelling it had come down to this: she was tired of his cheating ass.

“Look... Rich.” She shrugged, sent her eyes toward their son. “The thing is, I’m... I’m moving.”

His forehead frowned, his mouth smiled. “What do you mean, moving?”

Her eyes came back to him, pointedly. “What do you think, moving? Pack your shit and get in the car and go, moving. Christ, Rich.”

“Where to?”

She laughed bitterly. “To the St. Regis, maybe. What the hell do you care.”

“I care.”

“Right. My sister’s.”

“Your sister’s. Your sister lives in Vegas.”

Laurie grunted a tiny laugh. “Thanks for paying attention. I didn’t know my family even made it on your radar.”

He was shaking his head now, grinning, astounded. “Vegas? You want to take our kid to Vegas?”

The crunch and snap of breaking glass interrupted his words and his thoughts. He glanced over and a quartet of white kids were breaking pop bottles, hurling them onto the concrete path.

Richie picked up the thread, and tried to keep his tone civil. “Come on, Laurie. Be reasonable. You can’t move to Vegas.”

“Sure I can.”

“Not with Michael, anyway.”

Her eyebrows arched as she turned to him again. “Oh, there’s another option? What else am I supposed to do with him? Leave him with you? There’s a picture. You could turn the closet into his bedroom, long as you keep your box of weed on the top shelf where he can’t get to it.”

“That’s not fair...”

More glass shattering seemed to mirror the state of his mind, and he yelled over to the smart asses, “Hey! You want to keep it down over there? Find a new hobby!”

The teenagers looked at him, started laughing and went on smashing the bottles.

Doing his best to ignore this shit, finding it hard to think much less reason with Laurie over the constant brittle background noise, Richie said evenly, “You know we have joint custody, Laurie. Court won’t allow you to drag him out of state like that.”

“Are you sure?”

His eyes tightened. “I’m sure I won’t.”

She smiled at him but it was mostly a sneer. “You? It’s up to you, now?”

He slapped his chest. “You drag him out there, when am I supposed to see my goddamn son?”

Her eyes were wide and she was smiling, but it had nothing to do with the usual reasons for smiling; she was shaking her head, as if having witnessed something amazing.

She said, “How about last weekend? Or this weekend? Only you had to cancel. You had work. You had school. Maybe you had a bimbo or two, too.”

Michael, playing with two other little boys, heard the edge in his mother’s voice and turned to them with a pitiful little frozen smile.

Caught cold, both parents smiled and waved and nodded, and the boy — not entirely convinced, but placated, anyway — returned to his play.

Richie did his best to keep it low key. “Laurie, please. You can’t be serious about raising Michael in Las Vegas. What kind of place is that to—”

“Oh, and this is a good environment?” She looked at the sky for support. “What could I be thinking of? Mike would miss out on all your colorful friends, wise guys you grew up with, cop pals who’re even sleazier.” She gazed across the park toward the colorless Newark skyline. “Far as I’m concerned, there’re less creeps per square inch in Vegas than in this godforsaken armpit.”

Now Richie was shaking his head; it was his turn to feel amazed. “Vegas is the most mobbed-up town in America, Laurie! What’s Mike gonna grow up to be in that cesspool? What the hell are you thinking?”

Her eyes bored into him and through him. “I’m thinking, Richie, of him. Not you. Not me. And not us. But Michael.”

Another bottle breaking put an exclamation mark after Laurie’s already pointed words; the noise was driving him fucking crazy... Little pricks...

“Goddamn it,” he said. He raised a finger to Laurie, as if telling a dog to stay, and he strode over toward the teenagers, kids wearing letter jackets and smartass expressions.

Richie was a big guy, but there were four of them, who laughed as he approached, trading looks with one another before they all glared mockingly his way: What are you gonna do about it, old man? Four against one!

“I told you nice,” Richie said evenly, “to shut the fuck up.”

Their cocky expressions were curdling, but one of them managed, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Gran’pa?”

Richie shook his head. “Okay. Have it your way. Now I’m gonna kill your punk asses.”

And from under his jacket he snapped the revolver off his hip and aimed it at the one who’d just spoken.

One at a time Richie gave each formerly mocking face a look down the short but impressive barrel of the weapon. Instinct made them cover their heads, as if keeping the sound of a bullet from their ears would be enough to shield them.

One kid squeezed a few frightened words out: “What do you want from us, mister?”

“I want you,” Richie said, smiling terribly, “to pick up that fuckin’ glass!”

They almost dove to the pavement and the nearby grass, complying, finding every fragment, from jagged-edged chunk to splintery shard, and taking them to a nearby trash can, under Richie’s casual but strict supervision, his gun still in hand.

Other people had noticed the confrontation, from the prettiest moms to the ones Richie’s eyes hadn’t bothered with, and the blonde whose inventory he’d earlier been taking asked nobody in particular, “Shouldn’t somebody call the police?”

Laurie, having already collected Michael, passing by on the way out of the park toward her car, said, “He is the police. Hard to believe, I know.”

Richie didn’t see or hear any of this. He didn’t even see his son’s puzzled expression as the boy looked back at his father holding the gun on those bigger kids. The child felt a sensation that was far too complex for him to parse: shame intertwined with pride. But he would feel it again.

And by the time Richie had made the teenagers clean up after themselves, his wife and son were long gone, and so were most of the other moms and kids, leaving him alone on the grassy patch where, minutes before, his son had played under a blue-gray sky on a day that seemed suddenly colder.

Richie Roberts’s apartment in Newark was nicer than a junkie’s.

Barely.

Though the way he lived offered no proof, Richie was human and could hardly help but glance around his bleak little pad without thinking of the Manhattan town house or lovely suburban home he could be living in, if he weren’t a stick-up-his-ass fool. He had no choice but to think about the great food — French cuisine maybe (though he’d never really had any, unless you counted fries) — that he could be eating right now, as opposed to standing at his gas stove pouring a can of Campbell’s into a pot with his stitched-up black-and-blue hand.

But it wasn’t just the nice digs he could be enjoying or the great food he might be chowing down on. It was denying those things to his family; that’s what grated.

What kind of fucking idiot walks away from a cool million? Walks away, knowing he’s alienated not just his own partner, but every goddamn cop in New Jersey and, when word got out (which it probably already had), New York to boot?

He could still feel the eyes on him when he’d walked out of that Newark police station, all by himself — even Javy Rivera hadn’t been up to accompanying him — knowing this quiet, staring response was not out of awe or respect over Richie turning his back on all that crooked bread, no. These looks spoke of contempt, on the one hand, and fear on the other.

He would never be trusted again by his fellow cops.

The saving grace was that he wouldn’t have to be a cop much longer.

He got himself a spoon and hauled his pot of soup over to the little cluttered desk, piled with law textbooks. Almost at random, he cracked open a text and started his night’s studies for the upcoming New Jersey Bar exam. On the wall nearby, casting silent encouragement his way, was a framed photograph of one of his heroes: heavyweight champ Joe Louis, standing over the sprawled, vanquished Billy Conn.

When the soup was gone, the hunger sated but the tension gnawing, Richie went to the small wooden box that was his stash, where an ounce or so of grass waited along with rolling papers and clips.

He rolled a joint, smiling to himself at his hypocrisy, and soon was mellowed out and deep in his studies, smoke swirling to the ceiling like his conscience trying to find its way to freedom.