The Subtle Art of Brutality

Darlene couldn’t say no because the girls were just too cute and the dog loved the beach. Darlene had joined them for dinner the night before and she left Tug there with them when she left for home, so they could get an early start north in the morning. At the dinner table with Rose, Daniel, and the two girls, Darlene wondered how she would like a family of her own.

She often speculated, but never for very long. There was a lot about being free to be herself she was not willing to give up. Sometimes Darlene felt it could be a selfish reluctance. Most of the time she understood she definitely had it in her to love and comfort and be loyal and be compassionate and passionate, but she was far from ready to have anyone be wholly dependent on her and would never let herself be totally dependent on another.

Meantime, she did have her trusty pooch.

And she did have her fun.

Darlene jogged in place for a minute before skipping up the front stairs and entering her small house opposite Buena Vista Park.

Norman Hall stood across Roosevelt Way in the park and watched as Darlene Roman closed the front door. Norman had been watching her jog around the park nearly every morning for more than a week. Hall sat down on a park bench and he stared at the house. He lit another cigarette and wondered where the dog was.

Sergeant Johnson was having one of his worst days in recent memory and it was not yet eight in the morning.

Things had actually been going downhill since the previous day. His wife had flown to Philadelphia in the afternoon. She was attending a big bash to celebrate her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary on Saturday. Johnson politely declined the invitation to join her. He didn’t get along particularly well with his father-in-law. If he had to describe the man in two words they would be pompous ass. The man never missed the opportunity to insult Johnson, never blew a chance to remind his daughter she could have done a lot better choosing a husband. Johnson’s wife, Amy, came from Pennsylvania aristocracy—and marrying a police officer, the son of a San Francisco welder, was something her father and other members of her self-important dynasty could never understand. Even after the old man’s stroke, nearly eighteen months earlier, when for two months he could hardly speak, he managed somehow to articulate his lack of respect for his son-in-law and his disappointment in Amy for bringing someone so common into the family.

Rocky could only imagine what they all would think if they had known Johnson in his late teens and early twenties, when he ran with the Polk Street Pirates, a gang that plagued the neighborhood with an extende

d rash of vandalism and petty burglary. But, then again, to these people, being a cop was not all that different from being a thug.

Johnson had seen plenty of ugly things in his sixteen years on the job and sometimes had difficulty seeing the distinction himself, but he always saw a bad cop as the exception and not the rule and did not abide with anyone who preached police corruption was a given. He never saw himself as a knight in shining armor, but he knew when citizens needed protection or sought justice a good cop was their best bet.

And he was a good cop.

Every time Johnson was forced to deal with Amy’s dad he was given grief and the only thing that kept him from tearing the old goat’s head off after another barrage of unveiled insults was the thought of his own father and the pride in his dad’s eyes when Johnson graduated from the police academy after all of the troubled years when Bert Johnson feared his only son might end up on the wrong side of the jail cell bars.

The only ally he had in his wife’s family was Amy’s mother, who apparently cared enough about her daughter to wish her well. But to have to put up with an arrogant jerk-off like her husband for forty years made Amy’s mother a saint or a masochist or both. Johnson felt sorry for the woman, but not sorry enough to join the festivities in the Quaker State.

Amy, of course, was on his side.

She recognized his dilemma. She was very familiar with her father’s rudeness and understood Johnson’s reluctance to subject himself to verbal abuse. Amy Johnson could not insist her husband accompany her to Philadelphia, nor could she ignore her mother’s pleas that Amy be there.

So Johnson stayed at home alone.

And he tried preparing his own dinner after Amy left but he burnt the crap out of it.

He was cajoled into a drink fest with one of the old gang from his Polk Street days and was sick as a dog and couldn’t sleep, especially without Amy there to scold him and then hold him.

After lying in a very hot bath for more than an hour and drinking more than a gallon of water he finally achieved some semblance of sleep.

And less than two hours later the telephone rudely woke him.

Now, before eight in the morning, the sergeant was crowded behind a desk in the lobby of a high-rise apartment house looking down at a dead doorman.

The lobby was a menagerie by now. Police officers escorting tenants from the elevators out to the street, keeping them away from the security desk and the victim, more officers outside interviewing tenants and trying to keep rubber-necking pedestrians moving along the street, crime scene investigators collecting evidence, ambulance personnel waiting for the body.

Dr. Steven Altman, the Medical Examiner, rose from the corpse to stand beside Johnson.

“How did he break his neck?” Johnson asked.

“Someone broke it for him,” Altman said.

“Great.”

“Where is the lovely Lieutenant Lopez?”

“She has the day off.”

“Lucky girl.”