The Good Cop Read Free Page A

I’m here to write a tribute to Darius.”
    The word “tribute” was deliberate, of course. If I said I was there merely to write a “story,” there would still have been some doubt as to my intentions. I wanted to make it clear I was coming in peace.
    “Oh,” she said, like this surprised her.
    “I’m Carter Ross. Are you Mrs. Kipps?”
    “Yes. I’m Noemi”—she pronounced it no- em -mee—“but call me Mimi. Everyone else does.”
    “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.
    “Thank you,” she said, opening the door a little wider.
    And, just like that, I was in. I walked into a living room filled with older women, most of them substantially larger than Mimi, all of them staring at me, all of them black.
    I always get a kick out of white people who complain that blacks are “obsessed” with race and talk about it too much. If those white people could, just once, walk into a room like this, where suddenly they were the Other Race, they’d understand the “obsession” just a little better. Because you know what? We can all say we’re color-blind, and we can claim that race doesn’t matter in an America that has elected a black president.
    But that’s foolishness. Race matters. It mattered at my prep school, where in a student body of five hundred there were maybe fifteen black kids, thirteen of whom had been brought there to play football or basketball. It mattered at my alma mater, Amherst College, where we were all supposedly enlightened multiculturalists, yet we still fell back into the easy comfort of our groups, black, brown, white, and yellow. It matters in my workplace, where editors have been known to pair reporter and assignment based on skin color, simply because you just couldn’t send a white reporter to write Story X, or you really had to send a Hispanic reporter to do Story Y. And until some distant time many centuries from now when there is a truly American race—when we’ve all interbred enough that the races are no longer distinct—it will continue to matter everywhere else in our society, too.
    So I was the white guy in the room. And not just any white guy. I’m a purebred WASP, straight off the not-so-hardscrabble streets of Millburn by way of tennis camp. My quick read told me Mimi didn’t have a problem with white guys. She had bought the “tribute” line. But these other black women were still undecided. They were eyeing me with a mix of curiosity and hostility, their protective instincts fully engaged.
    “This is the man from the newspaper,” she announced. “He’s here to write about Darius.”
    “I just want to be able to write about what kind of person he was,” I interjected, “tell some nice stories about him.”
    Mimi proceeded to introduce me to the six women in the room, a series of aunties and cousins whose names I didn’t quite register. I’d get them later. I didn’t even have my notebook out to write them down. For now, it was more important to smile pleasantly, make good eye contact, and shake a hand if it was offered to me.
    Then she led me around to the corner, where there was a crib, one of those portable Pack ‘N Play things. Inside, a shriveled-looking baby slept soundly.
    “This is Jaquille,” she said. “Darius’s son. He’s five months.”
    That explained the raccoon eyes Mimi was sporting. I thought she looked like she hadn’t slept for a month. She probably hadn’t, with this little guy in her life.
    And I do mean little. Since I hadn’t entered the reproductive portion of my life—Tina’s entreaties having been unsuccessful—I didn’t know from babies. But this one looked awfully small.
    “He was born two months premature,” Mimi said, reading my mind. “He weighed three pounds, four ounces. He was in the hospital the first two months, because of some stuff with his lungs. But he’s fine, now. He’s up to nine pounds.”
    “He’s beautiful,” I said, which was a flat-out lie. Like most newborns, Jaquille looked like