There was a memorial service for Rebecca Gibson later that afternoon, down on Broadway at Christ Episcopal Church. I figured I’d take a chance on catching Ford, then head back downtown for the service. I wasn’t sure what I’d get out of attending the service, but it seemed like it couldn’t hurt anything.
I rounded the slick concrete ramp on the third level and headed, slightly winded and quickly moistening, up toward my car. Ahead of me, the faded, chipped paint on the wall gave the place a decayed look, and I fought not to think of how far my life had deteriorated in the past couple of years. Back at the newspaper, I had seniority in the parking lot as well as the office, with a prime spot in the employee lot down in the Gulch, the area that ran below the Church Street Viaduct down in back of the newspaper building.
What the hell, I thought, think of it as a built-in exercise machine.
Above me, there was a crash. Not a loud one, not the heavy metallic grind of cars slamming into each other, but more of a thud followed by …
Breaking glass.
I quickened my steps halfway up the ramp, then broke into a trot. A half-dozen steps later there was another crash, this time louder, followed by the distinct tinkling of shattered glass hitting concrete.
I accelerated from a trot to a run, but my street shoes were slick on the concrete and I missed a couple of steps, almost losing my footing. I reached out to regain my balance, then hit the top of the ramp. I whipped around a concrete pillar and saw, at the farthest end of the garage, a running hulk of a man maybe sixty yards away from me. All I saw was a blur of blue legs and a pair of arms in a checked shirt pumping away.
“Hey!” I yelled, without thinking. I put everything I had into it, figuring that somebody hauling ass like that in a direction away from me was certainly up to no good.
Whoever he was, he knew how to run. He outpaced me, getting to a large steel door with a push bar before I was even a quarter of the way down the building. He slammed the brass exit bar and was through in a half second, leaving only a puff of dust as the door closed behind him.
I ran like hell, hoping he’d gotten stuck out there somehow. But the door exited out onto an exterior stairwell that ran straight down the side of the building to a driveway that led, in turn, to the alley behind the parking garage. I gave it all I had, but by the time I got to the door, I was puffing so hard I wouldn’t have heard his footsteps even if he’d still been there. As I held on to the door to keep from being locked out of the garage, I caught a glimpse of him rounding the corner of the building and streaking into the alley.
There was no use following. He was long gone.
I sputtered, straining to get my breath back. Sweat had broken out everywhere, and I felt like ripping my suit coat off.
I pushed the door all the way open and stepped back into the garage. I wondered what the hell had gone on, when I noticed my shoes were crunching on the concrete. I bent my knee and examined the bottom of my right shoe.
Broken glass was embedded all over the sole.
Oh, boy, I thought. Somebody’s in for a lousy surprise when they get off work. I was debating getting involved with the police when I noticed a spray of broken glass on the concrete about a dozen cars ahead of me.
I worked myself up to a trot again, my fears growing as I approached the twinkling mess. Then I got to the car, which had been tucked in between two long sedans so that its nose was invisible unless you were right on top of it.
My car.
The windshield was smashed in, with a thousand bits of glittering safety glass all over the hood and a gaping hole right in front of the steering wheel. My heart sank as I walked over and surveyed the damage.
There was a large, ragged-edged chunk of brick lying beside the driver’s side door, but no attempt had been made to break into the car. Mindless, idiotic vandalism, I thought. If I’d only been here a couple of minutes sooner, I thought, I could have stopped the guy.
Or maybe he’d have used the brick on my head.
The sweat I’d worked up turned into icicles as I realized what had happened. Was I getting paranoid? Somebody trashed my car, but didn’t even try to steal the stereo. I’m getting death threats on the phone and bricks through the windshield.
What the hell’s going on?
“What the hell do you mean?” I demanded. “The police don’t take these calls anymore? Lady, my car has been vandalized, for God’s sake!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the impersonal voice on the other end of the line said. Then she repeated her canned explanation of why the police are too busy to respond to routine car break-ins. There are just too many of them. She could, she offered, assign a report number that might satisfy my insurance company.
“I don’t
“Sir.” Her tone shifted to the stern one she used when her kids were out of control. “It’s against the law to drive without liability insurance.”
“Aw, assign it a number,” I said, giving her my best Bowery Boys go-to-hell attitude as I slammed the phone down.
I thumbed through the Yellow Pages and found the auto-glass companies. I called four of them and discovered, to my utter confounded amazement, that they all charged the same amount to replace my windshield.
“What a coincidence,” I said to Polite Young Receptionist Number Four. “A hundred and fifty is what the other three companies said.”
“Oh, yessir,” she said, missing the massive dose of smart-ass I’d injected into my voice. I guess she wasn’t too up on price-fixing laws, either. “We all charge the same.”
She’d already told me that the windshield replacement would take a couple of hours, so I figured what the hell. Price fixing or no price fixing, I had them right where they wanted me.
“The only problem is,” I explained, “I’ve got to be somewhere. I can’t wait around.”
“That’s okay, sir. We can bill your insurance company direct, then put your deductible on a credit card.”
I cleared my throat. “I don’t have any insurance.” I half expected her to hang up on me in disgust.
“Oh,” she said. Her voice dropped about fifty percent in volume. “You seem like a nice guy. Noninsurance claims we’ll let slide by for a hundred. That okay?”
I tried not to gasp. Ordinarily, I don’t like benefiting from rip-offs, but in this case I’d make an exception. “Sure, that’d be great. Can I put it on a card?”
“Sure, go ahead,” she said pleasantly. I opened my walled and took out my VISA card, which the last time I’d checked still had just about enough left on the credit limit to cover the bill.
“We’ll take care of it, Mr. Denton. Thanks so much.”
I hoofed it out of the building and down Seventh Avenue to Broadway, pondering all the while the confusing array of moral choices that day-to-day living involves, not to mention the implications involved in a society that does everything it can to make being a crime victim as convenient as possible.
In a city where you can’t throw a dead cat out a window without hitting a church, Christ Church stands out as one of the grandest. A nineteenth-century Anglican cathedral, its gray stone spires tower over Broadway just across the wide avenue from the federal courthouse.
In the end, I was glad I walked. The cars waiting to get into the inadequate parking lot adjacent to the church had traffic blocked all the way down the hill. Horns blared and tempers flared as even the usual crowd of winos that hung out on the steps of the church was driven away.
A crowd of people, dressed in everything from jeans and rhinestone-studded cowboy shirts to three-piece suits, gathered in front, milling about and making small talk. Women and men huddled together, their faces close, lips moving, with an occasional physical gesture of comfort or familiarity. On the fringes, television and print reporters scouted the crowd for celebrities. Off in another corner, one bright, young, fresh-scrubbed face was doing what looked like a live remote.
