Judging Time by Glass Leslie

Author:Glass, Leslie [Glass, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective, Mystery & Detective - General, Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Fiction - Mystery, New York (N.Y.), Mystery & Detective - Women Sleuths, Policewomen, Fiction, Woo, Mystery fiction, April (Fictitious character), Mystery & Detective - Police Procedural, General, Women Sleuths
ISBN: 9780451195500
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2010-10-16T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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