Jon Talton - Powers of Arrest

But he did neither. He crossed over Interstate 71, got on Reading Road, and then turned again on Liberty Street. The steeples, spires and towers of the old city spread out ahead. It was as if he were driving to Will’s house. Will was about to alert Dodds when Buchanan sped past the familiar turnoff and kept going. They were in the heart of the city now. People were on the sidewalks. It occurred to Will that all this time he had been following Buchanan, he had never checked to see if someone was following him. The rearview mirror looked benign, but would he really know?

They drove straight through Over-the-Rhine doing fifty, making every light. Buchanan slowed at Linn Street and turned left, barely missing a pedestrian. Will was right behind him. It couldn’t be helped if he was going to make the light. Now he backed off and gave the Mercedes plenty of room. Only an unmarked police car in the West End, where the old housing projects once stood-nothing suspicious, Mr. Buchanan, drive on. Enjoy the majestic half rotunda of Union Terminal off to your right. They were not far from the Laurel Homes, now demolished, where Will’s father had been gunned down on a domestic abuse call. It was a reality never far from his mind.

After several blocks more, Linn lifted up over the massive gash of Interstate 75. Buchanan turned west again on Eighth Street and they plunged into the warehouse district and under the railroad tracks. The main police channels remained on routine business.

Now Will was growing curious. Despite what many east-siders thought, there were some lovely neighborhoods west of I-75, the Sauerkraut Curtain-although old-timers applied that term to Vine Street-but Buchanan was not driving into one. When the sunlight found them again on the other side of the railroad underpass, they were in Lower Price Hill. He could keep going and follow Glenway’s rightward arch around the tree-covered bluff ahead of them and keep going uphill. But he was slowing down.

They weren’t on a hill. The real Price Hill was directly ahead, and it, too, had once been connected with an incline railway, but Will couldn’t say exactly where. Lower Price Hill was in the basin above a broad swoop of the Ohio River, and although the city had designated it a historic district that couldn’t make up for the blight and crime. He had been on a shooting call here a week ago Wednesday, on Neave Street. Many of the rowhouses held the classic Italianate features found in Over-the-Rhine, but few people were trying to gentrify the properties. Vacant lots and junk cars proliferated. It was slowly falling apart.

If Kenneth Buchanan “spoke Cincinnati,” he would know that he was among the briars, the local term for poor Appalachian whites. This had long been a closed, clannish part of town. Once the briars had migrated down the river, then on the railroads, finding decent jobs in the factories around the rail yards of Mill Creek. It was their way out of the coalmines. Now most of those manufacturing jobs were gone. The factories were being gutted, their scrap sold to China. Some of the junkyards were in this neighborhood. Poverty was high. The place was also growing more African-American, and that made for racially charged confrontations. Like most of the older, poorer parts of the city, it was losing population.

And here was Kenneth Buchanan, white-shoe downtown lawyer.

He turned down two-lane State Avenue, going twenty-five. Will waited for the red light and sat, watching him slow. Then a truck passed, obscuring the view, and when it was gone so was Buchanan’s Mercedes.

Will turned left and cruised slowly down the street. Some large old multi-story brick apartments were on the left, and a few forlorn rowhouses stood on the right.

“Hello,” he said to himself.

Buchanan had parked in an empty lot next to a two-story brick rowhouse that had lost both its siblings. The front windows were boarded up with old wood and the paintless door looked barely on its hinges. Buchanan’s car was empty. Will picked up speed, went to the next intersection, turned around, and found a place behind a rusty pickup truck. He called Dodds.

“Guess where I am?”

“Hope it’s more interesting than my life, sitting outside a cop’s house.”

“Lower Price Hill. Buchanan drove over here. He parked and went inside a house.”

“No shit?” Dodds thought about it. “Maybe he’s a secret meth head.”

“Maybe.” Will watched a young man with mussed light-brown hair, hard-muscled in a wife-beater shirt, walk past giving him the eye. He ignored him. “It’s about the last place I’d expect him. You see anything around my place?”

“Nope,” Dodds said. “I’m encouraging my hemorrhoids.”

Will made a note of the address and waited. It took nearly half an hour before Buchanan stepped down on the crumbling sidewalk and walked purposefully to his car. He was wearing a light-blue shirt, tan slacks, and expensive tasseled shoes. His face was set in a hard look, and he didn’t even turn his head in Will’s direction. Then the expensive car’s backup lights flared and it was on the street. Will decided to stay.

It was another half hour before Will saw movement at the door. First a bicycle tire, then the whole bike being pushed by a woman. She wore blue jeans and a Bengals T-shirt, but what you first noticed was her hair, vivid red and flowing down over her shoulders. She swung a leg over the bicycle seat and pedaled north. Will let her go for a moment, then started the car and followed slowly. Her hair caught the sun and wind, making a lovely orange sail.

“7140, 7140.”

He muttered a profanity and picked up the mic.

The dispatcher came back: “Meet the officers, signal nine, Queensgate Playfield. We have a sixteen at large. Respond Code three.”

“7140 responding.”

It was a shooting with a suspect at large. He gripped the steering wheel tighter but stayed on the girl.

She stopped at Meisner’s market and went inside, bike and all. Will parked in front.

No more than two minutes later, she came back out, stuffing a red-and-white carton of Marlboroughs in her purse. She started to swing over the bike, when he tapped the horn. She looked him over and ignored him. He hit the emergency lights and she paid attention.

He flashed his badge when she came to the driver’s side. “Climb in.”

“What about my bike?”

“Lean it against the front of the car where we can watch it.” For all he knew, it was one of the few things she owned in the world. As she did so, he tossed his cane in the back seat.

Once she was in the car, he could see her more clearly. She was younger than he had first assumed, and her fiery hair framed a lovely face, the home to startlingly blue eyes. Her features were uniformly delicate and her skin was as flawless as Kristen Gruber’s. Put her in different circumstances on the east side and she would have worlds offered to her.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Will said. Time was running against him, even if the call location was close. If Fassbinder knew what he was really doing, all his dreams of revenge could be quickly visited on Will’s head. He kept the agitation out of his voice. “You had a visitor a few minutes ago, well-dressed man, middle-aged.”

“So?”

“So, are you a pro?”

“No! I don’t turn tricks, don’t do drugs.” She pointed out the window at a passing man. “Why don’t you people do something about the niggers overrunning our neighborhood, instead of hassling me?”

East side, west side, race was never far below the surface in Cincinnati.

“What’s your name?”

“Jill.”

He asked her to show him her driver’s license and wrote down the information: Jill Evangeline Bailey and the addressed matched the shabby place she had come from. She was nineteen.