Judging Time

26

The wail of sirens was almost continuous during the morning hours. Many times Liberty crossed the room to peek behind the parade of orange-and-black giraffes on the African print fabric secured over the window facing the side street. All he saw each time was a group of ragtag males more old than young. They hung out on the front steps of a brownstone identical to the ones on either side. Each time the sirens wailed, two or three of them would drift off in different directions, leaving the same lone man sitting there with a pail and a mop by his side.

The pail and the mop and the man with a flat backpack and bulging side pockets never left the brown-stone stoop. He sat there in the cold as Liberty read his E-mail. Sat there in the middle of the block, without coffee or gloves to warm him. Sat there, lost in some space of his own, impervious to cold as his buddies drifted in around him and then dispersed like a school of aimless fish. Sat there loose-limbed and semi-awake, tuned in somewhere else, waiting.

There he sat, like a benchmark signifying Liberty's own downfall, the man his mother and grandmother feared even before he could toddle or talk that Liberty himself would somehow become. The man with the mop and the pail he didn't intend to use was the bogeyman of Liberty's childhood. He was the black bum, the fatherless, motherless, black everyman. He was all the soulless nobodies, unwashed and unwanted at the table at Christmas or Easter or the Fourth of July. He was the signature of failure in every respect, the one for whom no one was left to mourn each day of his empty, worthless, no-good, self-destructive life. The drinker, the drifter, the wastrel, the thief. Loose-limbed, loose-lipped. Greatest pride and best handiwork of the devil himself. Conspiracy of the Confederate legacy, the federal government, and all the forces against God and decency combined. The anxiety had been there in Liberty's childhood every day of his life, an unarticulated prayer in his mother's heart—Oh, Lord, don't let my boy end up like that. Amen, Jesus.

And there he was, rooted to the spot outside Liberty's window, mocking everything he'd become. Behind another curtained window in another dimension of cyberspace was Liberty's E-mail. It sat there in its own place waiting to ambush him with more opinions he didn't want to have. He was receiving a single message over and over: A lot of people thought he murdered his wife simply because they'd always felt there was no other way the story of a pretty white woman and a nigger bastard could end.

Liberty replied to a few and initiated a dozen or so of his own, assuring his partners and friends that he was safe and seeking legal advice in a timely and orderly way in just the manner they had advised him. He called Wally Jefferson half a dozen times, but Wal-ly's wife, said he wasn't home. He called Marvin, but Marvin was out of the office. He stared at a cockroach climbing the wall in front of him and flashed to the two cops "interviewing" him in his apartment yesterday.

"If you have something to tell us about the night your wife died, now would be a good time." The one called Sanchez had looked at him in a friendly manner, as if he had nothing against people killing their wives and would be totally sympathetic to a confession.

"I told you everything I know." Liberty remembered the heat jolting through his body like lightning as he talked.

"I know you said that, Mr. Liberty. But there are a lot of ways we can go with this."

Liberty moved back in time to that first terrible point of reference, the "harmless hazing," as the administration at his boarding school had called it when five of the boys on his floor told him he had to be their slave, to kneel, touch his head to the ground, and say "Yes, massa," no matter what they told him to do or when they told him to do it.

The boys didn't understand that five of them were not enough to force him to kneel. Nor ten of them, or indeed the whole school. When he refused and they piled on him in an attempt to lower him to his proper place so they could urinate on him, one got a broken nose that bled all over the room, another got a broken arm, and a third a fractured jaw. The other two escaped with bad cuts and bruises. And the whole community rose to expel him from their midst. No one had told the fourteen-year-old Liberty the rule. The rule was white boys could hurt him but he could not defend himself. The parents of the boys in question, the student council, and the town paper called for his dismissal despite an investigation that absolved him of any wrongdoing. And when he begged to go home to end the confrontation, the administration, for reasons of its own, and his mother, who didn't want him to turn out a bum, had refused to let him.

Liberty was a rich man now. He traveled first class, had the best of everything. People asked for his opinion, wanted him to go on television, took his picture wherever he went. But it seemed that nothing really had changed.

"You asked me every question a dozen different ways. I flew to Chicago and missed the play. If I had been there as I was supposed to be, my wife and friend would still be alive." Liberty said it with no emotion, trying not to let go of his soul.

"But you were in the city. Your doorman and the driver of your car service said you got home around midnight. You knew where your wife was." "Yes, but I didn't leave the apartment. I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life. If I'd gone to get her, no one would have attacked her." Liberty lowered his head, taking the blame for the situation.

"How do you know?" the Chinese cop asked.

Liberty turned his head to look at her. "Would you take me on?" he asked bluntly.

"Is that why your friend had a heart attack?" Sanchez was the one to reply. .

"I don't understand the question."

"Did your friend Tor take you on?" The Chinese woman was standing on the other side of him, watching him with the cold indifference of a sphinx.

"Me?" he'd replied, puzzled.

"Yes. Were you jealous of your friend's relationship with your wife and—?"

He shook his head. "I didn't leave the apartment."

"Why would anyone want to hurt your wife?"

"Why would anyone want to hurt anyone? Why would you want to hurt me?"

"We don't want to hurt you, sir. We just want to know what happened January sixth, the night your wife was murdered. Why don't you tell us. You know we're going to find out in the end anyway."

Keys ground in one lock after another. Liberty had fallen asleep and was dreaming of Merrill, bleeding to death on the side of a mountain and himself struggling to bail her blood back inside of her body faster than it was pumping out. He could hear the police on the stairs and screamed as the apartment door burst open.

"What are you doing? What's going on here?"

No sound came out of his mouth. He was screaming in his mind.

"Hey! What's the matter with you? Can't you hear me?" It was the sandblasting voice of the crazy sister who wrapped her head twice its size. He took a deep breath, shuddering at his dream.

For a second she reminded him of his great-aunt Belle who'd been as tall as this woman, but big as an apartment building. That Belle had thought the world was all right until the civil rights movement came along in the sixties and personaliy stole her self-respect and set her back a few hundred years to a place nobody in his right mind would ever want to be, a sorry slave from another land. In Belle's world, color had been everywhere and color was fine. Color put no limits on the thing, was neither good nor bad, just was, sweet and bitter like birth and death. But the Movement took the sparkle, the highlights, the savor out of color, drained the nuance of the human palette in all its glory from Aunt Belle's life and made her Black.

"What's the matter wit you?" This Belle talked to him with a voice that streaked graffiti through sound waves.

Liberty saw that his computer power light was on, but the screen was blank. It had gone into hibernation. He must have been sleeping for a while. He hadn't finished the coffee the woman had made many hours ago. His mouth was dry. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

"Hey, man, I axed you a question. You got some kind of hearing problem?"

"No ma'am."

She took a few threatening steps into the room. "Then answer me when I talk wit you."

"Is that one of your house rules?" Liberty asked.

"What you talking about?"

"Your house rules, remember?"

"Uh-uh."

He raised a hand in peace. "Never mind."

She sucked in the side of her face, scowling. "You some sorry bastard," she said after a minute of staring at his hair.

"I'll agree with you there."

"You got any pills? Marvin said you ain't got no pills."

"I don't have any pills," Liberty said.

She cocked her head. "You gonna kill yourself?"

The woman moved in as if to protect him from himself. Now he could smell her. She didn't smell the way she looked or sounded. Smell was one of the first things he learned when he went to boarding school, how the rich smelled different from the poor. Clothes made the caste of a man, and so did smell. A person couldn't look good to the right people unless he smelled good to the right people, too. Very early on Liberty had learned how culture and color determined smell, and what one had to do about it.

Merrill had smelled like a field of berries. Raspberries and strawberries lived in her hair, in her skin. Liberty's stomach churned. This woman's chin jutted the way his sister's used to when she was defiant and knew she was in the wrong. And Belle didn't smell right. Something was wrong about her. Liberty had a sudden paranoid suspicion that she was a cop or an FBI agent, even a reporter, because she didn't exude any one of the heavy African spice potions of the sisters he knew. True homegirls went for deep and musky, earthy oil-based perfumes guaranteed to drop a brother in his tracks at a hundred paces. This girl smelled light and floral, with an undertone of orange peel.

He scratched his forehead. "What do you do for a living?" he asked abruptly.

She glared at him, the chin advancing even further on the battlefield. "None of your business."

"Miss Belle, do you happen to be the dealer in this building the police are looking for?"

"I told you I don't got no shit. If you gotta have it, you can git outta here now. There's lotsa shit out there." She pointed to the door.

Liberty shook his head. "I never liked the stuff. It makes you stupid."

She humphed through her nose.

"What's that mean?"

"Nothin'."

"It means you don't believe me. Well, we're even,

then." He punched a few buttons to shut his computer down and stood up, stretching.

"What you doin'?"

"I've invaded your privacy long enough. I know this has been a huge inconvenience. I apologize, and I'll be on my way."

Belle hoisted the canvas bag she'd been carrying to the table. "What for?"

He didn't answer.

"I axed you a question." She opened the bag and started unpacking the lunch she'd brought.

Liberty's stomach growled. "And I asked you one. If you don't have to answer, I don't have to answer."

"Jeesus," she muttered. "Is this important?"

"Trust is important to me. I prefer to know the people whose houses I hide in."

She stopped setting the table and parked a hand on her hip. "You wanna know who I am?"

"Yeah."

"What's it to you?"

"I don't know you. It's nothing to me, but if you're a dealer I don't want to be here when you're arrested. If you're a cop, I don't want you to tum me in."

A genuine laugh lit up her face. "What makes you think I'm either?"

He glanced at the merriment softening her features, then eyed the food, determined not to touch it. "Miss Belle, your accent comes and goes, and you don't live here."

"I thought ballplayers were dumb," she muttered.

"I haven't been a ballplayer for a long time."

"I guess you'll want a napkin."

He surveyed the meal a last time, then shook his head. "No thanks, I'm not staying."

"I made it myself."

"I have to go see someone."

"You'll have to wait till later." Belle picked up a fork. For a second Rick thought she was going to reach over and stab him with it. But she used it to fill a plate. She set the plate down in front of him.

His stomach growled again. He'd never liked bossy women, was sure he didn't like this one. She stood there, a bag of rags, pointing the fork at him.

"Your friend Tor was deep into the shit, man. Deep into it."

"I know that. It had been a problem in the past. I thought he was over it."

"No way, man."

"What about my wife . . . ?" The question hung there.

If Belle understood the question, she didn't show it. "Your wife was killed by a black man, that much we know."

"A black man, you sure?'

She nodded. "Could have been you." She gave him a hard look.

"Or Wally Jefferson."

Belle nodded, then switched her attention to the food on his plate. "Nothing runs on empty," she said.

"I've got to find that bastard."

"How about eating something first." Belle looked at the food. "I made it myself."

"All right." After a moment Rick sat down and took a bite.