The apartment door was open, and music blared from a stereo, Jagger singing about some girl. They could see a narrow hallway leading into a living area, and the air was thick with tobacco and booze and grass. The two officers exchanged a look.
“Call it,” said Will.
They stepped into the hall, Jimmy leading. “NYPD,” he shouted. “Everybody stay calm, and stay still.”
Cautiously, Will behind him, Jimmy peered into the living room. There were eight people in various stages of intoxication or drug-induced stupor. Most were sitting or lying on the floor. Some were clearly asleep. A young white woman with purple stripes through her blond hair was stretched out on the couch beneath the window, a cigarette dangling from her hand. When she saw the cops she said: “Oh shit,” and began to get up.
“Stay where you are,” said Jimmy, motioning with his left hand that she should remain on the couch. Now one or two of the more together partygoers were waking up to the trouble they might be in, and looking scared. While Jimmy kept an eye on the people in the living room, Will checked the rest of the apartment. There was a small bedroom with two beds: one an empty child’s cot, the other a double piled with coats. He found a young man, probably nineteen or twenty, and barely compos mentis, on his knees in the bathroom, trying unsuccessfully to flush an ounce of marijuana down a toilet with a broken cistern. When he frisked him, Will found three twists of heroin in one of the pockets of the kid’s jeans.
“What are you, an idiot?” Will asked.
“Huh?” said the kid.
“You’re carrying heroin, but you flush the marijuana? You in college?”
“Yeah.”
“Bet you’re not studying to be a rocket scientist. You know how much trouble you’re in?”
“But, man,” said the kid, staring at the twists, “that shit is worth money!”
Will almost felt sorry for him, he was so dumb. “Come on, knuckle-head,” he said. He pushed him into the living room and told him to sit on the floor.
“Okay,” said Jimmy. “The rest of you, against the walls. You got anything I should know about, you tell me now and it’ll go easier on you.”
Those who were able to rose and assumed the position against the walls. Will nudged one comatose girl with his foot.
“Come on, sleeping beauty. Nap time’s over.”
Eventually, they had all nine standing. Will frisked eight of them, excluding the boy he had searched earlier. Only the girl with the striped hair was carrying: three joints, and a twist. She was both drunk and R ah drunk ahigh, but was coming down from the worst of it.
“What are these?” Will asked the girl.
“I don’t know,” said the girl. Her voice was slightly slurred. “A friend gave them to me to look after for her.”
“That’s some story. What’s your friend’s name? Hans Christian Andersen?”
“Who?”
“Doesn’t matter. This your place?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sandra.”
“Sandra what?”
“Sandra Huntingdon.”
“Well, Sandra, you’re under arrest for possession with intent to supply.” He cuffed her and read her her rights, then did the same with the boy he had searched earlier. Jimmy took the names of the rest, and told them that they were free to stay or to leave, but if he passed them on the street again he’d bust them for loitering, even if they were running a race at the time. All of them went back to sitting around. They were young and scared, and they were gradually coming to realize how lucky they were not to be in cuffs, like their buddies, but they weren’t together enough to head out into the night just yet.
“Okay, time to go,” Will said to the two in cuffs. He began to lead Huntingdon from the apartment, Jimmy behind him with the boy, whose name was Howard Mason, but suddenly something seemed to flare in Huntingdon’s brain, cutting through the drug fog.
“My baby,” she said. “I can’t leave my baby!”
“What baby?” asked Will.
“My little girl. She’s two. I can’t leave her alone.”
“Miss, there’s no child in this apartment. I searched it myself.”
But she struggled against him. “I’m telling you, my baby is here,” she shouted, and he could tell that she wasn’t faking or deluded. Her concern was very real.
One of the group in the living room, a black man in his twenties with a beginner’s Afro, said, “She ain’t lyin’, man. She do have a baby.”
Jimmy looked at Will. “You sure you searched the place?”
“It’s not Central Park.”
“Hell.” He turned Mason back toward the living room. “You, sit on the couch and don’t move,” he told him. “Okay, Sandra, you say you have a kid. Let’s find her. What’s her name?”
“Melanie.”
“Melanie, right. You’re sure you didn’t ask someone to look after her for the evening?”
“No, she’s here.” Huntingdon was crying now. “I’m not lying.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out.”
There weren’t very many places to search, but they called the girl’s name just the same. The two cops searched behind the couches, in the bathtub, and in the kitchen closets.
It was Will who found her. She was under the pile of coats on the bed. He could tell that the child was dead from the moment that his hand touched her leg.
Jimmy took a sip of wine.
“The kid must have wanted to lie on her mother’s bed,” he said. “Maybe she crawled under the first coat for warmth, then fell asleep. The other coats were just piled on top of her, and she suffocated under them. I can still remember the sound her mother made when we found her. It came from someplace deep and old. It was like an animal dying. And then she just folded to the floor, her arms still cuffed behind her. She crawled to the bed on her knees and started to burrow under the coats with her head, trying to get close to her little girl. We didn’t stop her. We just stood there, watching her.
“She wasn’t a bad mother. She worked two jobs, and her aunt looked after her kid while she was at work. Maybe she was doing a little dealing on the side, but the autopsy found that her daughter was healthy and well cared for. Apart from the night of the party, nobody ever had any cause to complain about her. What I’m saying is that it could have happened to anyone. It was a tragedy, that’s all. It was nobody’s fault.
“Your old man, though, he took it bad. He went on a bender the next day. Back then, your father could drink some. When you knew him, he’d cut all that stuff out, apart from the occasional night out with the boys. But in the old days, he liked a drink. We all did.
“That day was different, though. I’d never seen him drink the way he did after he found Melanie Huntingdon. I think it was because of his own circumstances. He and your mother wanted a child real bad, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen for them. Then he sees this little kid lying dead under a pile of coats, and something breaks inside him. He believed in God. He went to church. He prayed. That night, it must have seemed as if God was mocking him just for the hell of it, forcing a man who had seen his wife miscarry again and again to uncover the body of a dead child. Worse than that, maybe he stopped believing in any kind of God for a time, as if someone had just pulled up a corner of the world and revealed black, empty space behind it. I don’t know. Anyway, finding the Huntingdon kid changed him, that’s all I can say. After it, he and your mother went through a real rough patch. I think she was going to leave him, or he was going to leave her, I don’t recall which. Wouldn’t have mattered, I suppose. The end result would still have been the same.”
He put the glass down and let the candlelight play upon the wine, spreading red fractals upon the tabletop like the ghosts of rubies.
“And that was when he met the girl,” he sai R adquo; he d.