Dark Stain Read Online Free Page A

a Red or some kind of a Jew or a screwball. Sam had heard a lot of this talk himself.
    The chill light of the hearing room, pouring down on the eyewitnesses in front of the Sergeant’s desk now seemed to him colder than ever. He felt a tap on his elbow. It was the cop whose life he had saved. “Mrs. O’Riordan wants me to thank you,” the cop said.
    “Who’s she?” Sam asked.
    “My wife.” O’Riordan beamed. He patted Sam’s arm and lowered his voice. “A lil more and that guy would’ve sunk that lousy Charlestown pistol of his into my gut. Would’ve spilled out the three glasses of beer I’d put into me belly not the hour before.” O’Riordan laughed heartily.
    Sam wiped his sweating face with his handkerchief. His sunken eyes gleamed fitfully as he glanced away from O’Riordan over to the witnesses, the ambulance driver, the attendant, the radio cops, the mounted policemen. He breathed in the muggy station house air and searched for Randolph’s mother. She was among the black faces. He sensed something impersonal, terrible because it was impersonal, in this station house; the same emotion he had experienced watching the clinic patients waiting for their next at the hospital; it was like being in a place where there were no men, only regulations, customs and laws that had turned into ice.
    O’Riordan whistled. “That boog almost got you. Jesus, look what he done to your collar.”
    Standing there next to O’Riordan, Sam tried to understand what had happened that afternoon. That afternoon, he had been down in the living world. In fever, in hate, in blood, in fear, all of them, the ambulance, the crowd, Randolph, O’Riordan, himself had been churned together and then blasted up out of the depths into the precinct station. What they had done was over now. The hearing would soon begin, the post-mortem into events vanished forever. The phantoms of the afternoon would be summoned, all but Randolph; their voices clamored in Sam’s head, meaningful, prophetic, the attendant’s, the crowd’s. Always, the crowd. Barred from the station house, the crowd nevertheless was present. Water below the ice.
    “Don’t you hear me?” O’Riordan said. “It’ll begin soon.”
    Sam’s fists clenched at his sides. That crowd had already passed judgment, the woman who had hit him with her bag, their mouthpiece, their sergeant. He was breathing faster, his eyes on Mrs. Randolph. He saw her in profile as if cut out of sheet metal, one brown shining eye under her grey brow. He wanted to plead with her, to say: “I tried my best to save your son. Please believe me.” His throat was full of a rasping ache. Abruptly, he walked away from O’Riordan over to Mrs. Randolph. A voiceless pity agitated him. She had lost her son.
    “Mrs. Randolph — ” he said.
    She looked up at him.
    He said quickly. “Believe me — I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to — Believe me. I couldn’t do anything else.”
    “You — You murderer.”
    Later, much later, after the hearing, Sam wandered aimlessly through the night-time city. He had changed into a grey tweed suit, a white shirt, a blue necktie. He had hung his uniform with the exception of the slashed coat (this was evidence held for the second hearing scheduled for the D.A.’s office in the morning) in his locker. He had walked south out of Harlem onto Columbus Avenue. In the night, the avenue was a broad open cut between the four and five story buildings. It was a neighborhod of tenements, of Irish subway conductors and German carpenters, dotted with furnished rooming houses full of dishwashers, soda jerks, laborers, a vast city of little men closeted behind the lit-up and darkened windows and adjacent to the black city to the north.
    Over and over again, Sam rehearsed what had occurred at the hearing. Numb and despairing, he remembered the division between the black and the white witnesses. “Self-defense,” said the whites. “Murder,” said the blacks.