Warren Murphy: Mugger Blood

But Mrs. Rosenbloom had gone in the spring. She had said she wanted to smell a fresh flower at noon again and she had remembered that before blacks had moved into the neighborhood there were daffodils in St. James Park in the spring and she was going to try to smell one in the bright sun. She knew they had to be up by now. So she had phoned and said goodbye in case something should happen. Gerd had warned her not to go but she had said she was tired of living without sunshine and even though she had the misfortune to live in a now dangerous place, she wanted to walk in the sun again. It was not her fault her skin was white and she was too poor to move away from blacks and she was too old to run or to fight them off. Maybe if she just walked out on the street, as if she had a right to, maybe she could get to the park and back.

And so Mrs. Rosenbloom had headed for the park that noon and the next day when Gerd had phoned one of the other whites who could not leave the neighborhood, he found out that Mrs. Rosenbloom had not contacted them either. Her phone did not answer.

Gerd reasoned that since there was nothing on the radio-he had a small silent earphone put in because that way you could keep a radio because they wouldn't know you had one and come to steal it-then Mrs. Rosenbloom was dead cleanly. The radio and the newspapers only had stories when they poured gasoline over you and burned you alive as in Boston or when whites committed suicide because the fear of blacks was too great as in Manhattan. The normal everyday deaths were not on the radio, so perhaps Mrs. Rosenbloom had died quickly and easily.

And later they saw someone who had known someone who had seen her body picked up, so she was dead definitely. It was not a wise move to go to the park. She should have waited for the New York City police to give a lecture on how to be mugged in the park, or gone in the very early hours when the only blacks out were the ones who worked and they left you alone. But she had wanted to smell the flowers under the noonday sun. There were worse things to die for than to smell a daffodil in the full sun. Mrs. Rosenbloom must have died cleanly. That was good in a neighborhood like this.

Was it a month ago that Mrs. Rosenbloom died? Two months? No, it was last year. When did Gerd die? When did they leave Germany? This was not Germany. No. This was America. And she was dying. It felt all right as if this was the way it should be. She wanted to die to go into that night where her husband waited. She knew she would see him again and was glad he had not lived to observe how horribly she was dying because she could never explain to him that it was all right. That it looked worse than it was and already, Gerd darling, she could feel the senses of the body leave, there being no more need for pain when the body dies.

And she gave God her last thanks on earth and felt good leaving her body.

When the life went from the frail old whitened form and the heat went and the blood stopped moving in the veins, the ninety-two pounds of human flesh that had been Mrs. Gerd Mueller did what flesh always did unless frozen or dried. It decomposed. And it smelled so frightfully that the New York City police finally came to collect it. Two large men with unholstered guns provided protection for the coroner's office. They made comments about the neighborhood and when the body was leaving on the stretcher, a gang of black youths cornered one of the policemen who fired off a shot, catching underarm flesh from one of the young men. The gang fled and the body went to the morgue untroubled and the detectives filed their reports and went home to the suburbs where they could raise their families sanely, in relative safety.

A boozy old reporter who had once worked for the many newspapers in New York City and now worked for a television station leafed through the homicide reports. It was just another old white person killed by blacks and he put it back in a pile of such reports. It offended him that human life would be so insignificant now, as if the city were at war. And it reminded him of another time, when deaths were also unimportant. It was thirty years before when blacks shooting other blacks just was not news.

He put down the reports and answered a call from the newsroom. A detective in the Bronx, trapped by a gang of black youths, had fired and wounded one. The Black Ministry Council of Greater New York was calling the shooting "barbarism." They were picketing the house of the policeman's lawyer, demanding an end to legal defense of policemen accused of shooting blacks.

The reporter was told by his assignment editor to link up with a camera and do an interview in front of the lawyer's home.

The pickets were lounging in cars when the reporter got there. He had to wait for his cameraman. When the camera arrived, it was as if everyone had suddenly been injected with adrenalin. Out of cars and off car hoods they came. They joined the circle and the cameraman got precisely the right angle to make it look as if an entire community was marching in front of this lawyer's house.

They chanted and marched. The reporter put the microphone in front of a very black man with a very white collar under his rutted face.

The reverend talked of maniacal policemen shooting down innocent black youths, the victims of "the worst racism ever seen by man."

The black man identified himself as Reverend Josiah Wadson, chairman of the Black Ministry Council, co-chairman of the World Church Group, executive director of Affirmative Housing Action I, soon to be followed by Affirmative Housing Action II. His voice rolled like mountains in Tennessee. He invoked the righteous wrath of the Almighty. He bemoaned white barbarism.

The reporter wished fervently that Reverend Wadson, a massive man, would talk upward instead of downward at the reporter, and, if possible, hold his breath.

Reverend Wadson reeked gin and his breath could have peeled epoxy off a battleship turret. The reporter tried to hide how painful it was to stand near Reverend Wadson's breath.

Wadson called for an end to police brutality against blacks. He talked of oppression. The reporter tried to hold his own breath so he would not have to inhale so close to the reverend.

He also had to hide the bulge under the reverend's black mohair jacket. The reverend packed a pearl-handled revolver and the assignment editor would never allow this film to appear showing that the reverend went around armed. The assignment editor didn't want to appear racist; therefore all blacks had to appear good. And unarmed, of course.

When the film appeared and was grabbed up by the network, there was the sonorous weeping voice of the reverend describing the awful plight of black youths and there were the outraged citizenry behind him, marching in protest, and there was the reporter hunched up, blocking the view of the reverend's gun, and the reporter was turning away every so often and when his face came back close to the reverend's, there were tears in his eyes. It looked as if the story the reverend told was so sad that the veteran reporter could not refrain from sobbing on camera.

When it was showed overseas, this was just what the foreign news announcers said. So terrible was the police oppression of black youths that a hardened white reporter broke down in tears. This little news clip became famous within days.

Professors sat around discussing police brutality, which became oppression, which became naturally enough "New York City police-planned genocide."

When someone brought up the incredibly high crime rate of blacks, the learned response was what could one expect after such attempted police genocide? It was asked on tests in universities. And those who did not know this answer failed.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gerd Mueller was buried with a closed casket. The funeral home had attempted to resurrect the left side of the old face but the wax rebuilding where her eye had been proved too difficult with old flesh. They couldn't turn in the folds in wax to build up her old cheek. It looked too young for the immigrant from Germany.