Part 27 (1/2)

In the morning a warm September rain fell. Our cabdriver, a West African, spoke what to me was nearly incomprehensible English. Nevertheless, he got us to our destination on West 104th Street. In this neighborhood bodegas and lavendaras automticas had replaced all the delicatessens and candy stores.

The drug program, occupying a ravaged brownstone east of Broadway, consisted of a reception room, a few offices, and bas.e.m.e.nt dormitories. It was early in the day but already hot. No air- conditioning here. A young Puerto Rican woman with red plastic curlers in her hair sat behind a metal reception desk. I spotted a c.o.c.kroach scuttling away from the water cooler.

Alan and I waited on a wooden bench. Three other young men- two black, one Hispanic-joined us. They were gaunt and worried- looking. Alan had brought a small suitcase, which he clutched between his knees. I was trying to see the place through my son's eyes. He was on the fringe of a foreign world that he didn't want to get involved in. To observe it was okay, to plunge into it was wholly unacceptable. I smiled with all the encouragement I could muster. But it wasn't much.

Our appointment was with Germaine Price, a frail, sharp-jawed woman in her late thirties, who led Alan into a small windowless office and asked me to wait outside.

Ten minutes later Alan came out and said, ”Dad, can I talk to you privately?”

We went into a bare room that contained an old school desk. Alan said, in a strangled voice, ”This program is for crackheads, real ghetto kids. The place they send you to, what they call the therapeutic community, is a hundred and twenty miles north of here, in the mountains near a town called Oakwood. You have to stay sixty days without even making a telephone call. You can't have anyone visit you for ninety days. You can't leave the grounds. It's like a prison. I don't need that.”

”What do you need, Alan?”

”I think I could take care of that misdemeanor business in Fort Myers. Go to court, explain things to the judge. Then I'd go to San Francisco, get a job. Get rid of my drug problem.”

”Alan, you're full of s.h.i.+t. I want to talk to Ms. Price. Stay here, all right?”

I went into her windowless office, wondering if Alan would be waiting when I came out. I saw myself arriving at Sarasota-Bradenton, saying to Toba, ”Sorry, I lost our son at a Hundred and Fourth Street and Broadway.”

I sat down with Germaine Price and said, ”Does this kid need your program, or is it overkill?”

”Mr. Jaffe, I'm telling you, if he doesn't do this or something like it, he'll die.”

I felt a worse chill than in the county jail at Starke. I reached for a cigarette, the first one I'd smoked that day.

”I have to a.s.sume you're exaggerating,” I said.

”No. Before their time, that's really what I'm saying. From AIDS, general deterioration, poverty, overdosing, s.h.i.+t that happens in prison. They can be bright, and they're usually good-natured, like your son seems to be. They lie a lot. They break your heart.”

”What's your background, Ms. Price?”

”Drug addiction and a master's degree in social psychology.”

I stepped back into the room where I'd left Alan; he was sitting on the desk, tapping his fingers on the scarred wood. His eyes were a little damp. But he hadn't fled.

I said, ”I don't have the answer for you, son. I have my own choice to make, and I've made it. If you don't go into this program, I wash my hands of you.” I made a sharp gesture with my hands, while I felt my heart cracking.

Alan's face twitched, and he shambled from the room.

Germaine Price came back to me half an hour later to tell me that he had gone downstairs to what they called Receiving. He had signed up. She shrugged; she'd seen this happen before. It wasn't a triumph, it was just a beginning.

He came up the stairs from the bas.e.m.e.nt with two black youths who wore leather windbreakers and torn jeans. One of them was tall and looked like a younger, slimmer Darryl Morgan.

”Who are they?” I asked Alan, after they had vanished into an office.

”Two guys in the family. They've been residents for a while- they're what's called expediters. Bucky and Jack. They're down here on a pa.s.s. We'll go up to Oakwood together in the van.”

He had the jargon already. Already he was Bucky and Jack's little white brother.

”Which one is the tall one?” I asked.

”Jack. Why?”

”He reminded me of someone.”

I took Alan with me to the front door and out on the stoop, while the rain drummed on concrete. In all those years I had been a prosecutor, I wondered, how many fathers and mothers had said goodbye to sons this same way? I looked into Alan's face and saw that he was close to tears. But he was brave; he was going. I hugged him and whispered, ”Good luck, my boy.”

Withdrawing from the embrace, I twisted my mouth into a smile and walked off into the rain toward Broadway. I had no umbrella, but I didn't care. A few beats later I turned around for one last look. I started to wave, but the stoop was empty.

One of the reasons we'd been prompted to leave Jacksonville had been Toba's feeling that it was too black. ”Black means more violence,” she'd said. ”More drugs.” I smiled, a little bitterly, for to cure that possible mistake on our part, I had wound up entrusting Alan's recovery to that same black community.

I went straight from Broadway and 104th Street to La Guardia Airport. Now it was Darryl Morgan's time, and there wasn't much left of it. But I had a plan. I didn't fly back to Sarasota. I flew to Orlando and changed planes for Gainesville.

Chapter 24.

HE SAW ME first in daylight, sitting behind the wheel of a rented car and staring at him as he came out of a supermarket wheeling a cart full of groceries bagged in plastic.

He wore the usual floppy pastel-colored cotton slacks and oversize white golf s.h.i.+rt that middle-aged Florida men wear in order to hide their paunches. I had been in the supermarket with him, trailing at a distance, watching him pluck from the shelves two six-packs of Lowenbru Dark Special, a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice, a pair of tenderloin steaks, a pound of peeled Gulf shrimp, Ben &C Jerry Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. Eclectic tastes and little regard for price; he was divorced now and did his own shopping.

I bought some potato chips and exited via the express checkout lane. Then I waited in the car.

There was a melodic tweet-tweet-tweet as Floyd Nickerson hit the beeper that disarmed the Viper alarm on his Buick. He looked up, and his eyes locked with mine from a distance of about twenty yards. There was nothing unusual in a man sitting in a car smoking a cigarette, so he probably thought little of it, although I stared pointedly and didn't drop my gaze for even a fraction of a second. He looked away.

He had noticed me; that was what mattered.

His house was diagonally across the street from the fifth hole of the Orange Meadow golf course-designed by Robert Trent Jones, the brochure proclaimed. That evening he ate at home. A woman arrived at a few minutes past seven o'clock. She was blond and strong-looking, a Viking in her early forties. I sat across the street by the fairway in the rental car, waiting for her to leave, but at midnight I gave up and drove back to the motel on the edge of the campus in Gainesville.

I prayed I wasn't playing the fool, but I knew it was possible. I had to have patience. Even more than patience, I had to have luck.

At seven-thirty the next morning I parked there again, across from the two-story pink house with its trellises of roses and climbing violet bougainvillea. At a few minutes past eight the electronic garage door rolled up smoothly and the big blond woman backed out behind the wheel of her Jeep Cherokee. Nickerson, a wet bath towel draped around thick shoulders, took a few steps from the interior of the garage to wave as she drove off.

He saw me again.

Under my breath I counted slowly to five. We aren't that far removed in time from our primitive animal reactions; five seconds is a long time for an adult male to be stared at directly by another adult male, whom he doesn't know and who doesn't drop his eyes, doesn't smile, and doesn't speak. It's about as long as a man can stand to be stared at without needing to demand why. I had read that in a Tallaha.s.see motel room in a book on police surveillance and interrogation.

I started the engine and cruised past the sand trap and out the eucalyptus-lined roads of Orange Meadow Estates. This was Floyd Nickerson's bailiwick, and he could easily have called security. He was still chief of it here.

I followed the woman's car north on 441 to a real estate office on University Boulevard in Gainesville. It was one of those modern gla.s.s-fronted offices where you could look in from the street and see the salespeople at their desks, exuding an air of important things getting done. Her desk was close to the window on the street. I didn't stop or park there; I just slowed down, had a good look, then kept driving.

The rest of that day I was more careful. I knew he'd be expecting the pattern to continue. If I'd had all the time in the world I would have taken a few days off, flown back to Sarasota, given him time to stew.

I didn't have the time.

I called him in the early evening from a public telephone in a service station. He answered with a gruff ”Yes?”

I hung up.