Free Playland by John Gregory Dunne Page B

happened after he threw me out of his car the previous day. To me a century before. “Say hello to Jerome Highsmith,” he said, waving in the general direction of a huge black man standing in front of the cafeteria’s bank of vending machines.
    Jerome Highsmith kicked a candy machine with the toe of a steel-plated industrial work shoe. It teetered until I thought it was going to topple over on him before rocking back into place. A second kick, and a third. Still no coins in the coin return, no candy bar in the tray. Jerome Highsmith stepped back, taking the measure of the machine, then removed his moth-eaten brown sweater. Deliberately he wrapped it over his right hand and made a fist, clenching and unclenching it. Suddenly glass shattered as Jerome Highsmith smashed his covered fist through the vending machine’s display window. I started as if a gun had gone off. Jerome Highsmith stared belligerently at me, daring me to object, then reached through the shards of glass and removed a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. He stripped awaythe foil, licking his fingers for any chocolate that might have stuck to them, then pushed the whole bar into his mouth, closing his eyes as he chewed, a dreamy look on his face.
    “I would have thought that was against the law.”
    Maury Ahearne scratched a scab on his scalp and examined the residue in his fingernails. “So make a citizen’s arrest.” More scratching, more scab. “I bust him, then he doesn’t testify when we go back inside. He doesn’t testify, there’s no case, and this guy Emmett that’s on trial walks. It’s a question of who you want on the bricks. Emmett or Jerome.” He smiled. One of those smiles designed to show how ignorant I was in the ways of his world. “Doesn’t mean a shit to me. Jerome took out a guy for a pack of cigarettes once, he’s such a solid citizen. Emmett’s up because he did a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. The reason he did him is he’s got this new gun, a Glock he stole from some white guy shoots at a target range, you know, with the earmuffs so the noise don’t hurt his ears.” In his world guns were supposed to make noise, and the noise was supposed to scare people, and people who wore earmuffs not to hear the noise were pussy hairs. “He wanted to see if it worked, Emmett.” Another smile. “It did.” The inevitability of the result seemed to satisfy him. “So Emmett stole his wallet and nine Hoovers while he was at it. A Cuban guy, the salesman. Ignorant fuck, thinking he was going to sell a vacuum cleaner to those people, you ever look at the shitholes they live in? But ‘Cuban’ means ‘white’ to the D.A. Killing white, can’t have that, he says. Waste of time. He’s going to walk, Emmett, Jerome or no Jerome.” It was like listening to an oral historian of urban carnage and anthropology. “Twelve jurors, two alternates, and ten of the fourteen are wearing shades, cool as shit. Judge loses his car keys yesterday, he was pissing and moaning about it to the court reporter, and one of the jurors raises his hand and says, ‘Your Holiness,’ I swear to Christ, that’s what he says, ‘Your Holiness,’ and then he proceeds to tell His Holiness how to hot-wire his fucking car. So I ran a check on him. What he does is work in a chop shop. Naturally. And draw unemployment.Naturally.” The detective detecting. “Forget the judge’s car, this guy could hot-wire an F-16. Then break it down and sell the spare parts to Saddam whatever the fuck that A-rab’s last name is. Bet the fucking house Emmett’s going to walk.”
    I looked around the cafeteria. On the walls were shadowy outlines of oversized graffiti cocks and cunts that custodial scrubbing had not quite succeeded in erasing.
    “So.” Another Maury Ahearne smile. “You survived.”
    No thanks to you, I thought. Perhaps he had been standing by the day before after all, ready to move in if the situation did get out of hand. I was not going to give him the