The memo about the Fall Clean Sweep had been taped to the inside of Lloyd Vartanian's locker door for nine days, and by Wednesday morning he could have recited it the way he could still recite the Our Father in Armenian, which is to say without hearing a word of it.
Downtown Improvement District partnership. Zero-tolerance enforcement of park hours and posted rules, Tollis Square, Riverfront Commons, Founders Plaza.
Officers assigned to the Park Ambassador detail will document all contacts and issue criminal trespass warnings where appropriate. Metrics to be reviewed at the end of the operational period. Someone, probably Sergeant Kwiatek, had underlined the word metrics in blue ballpoint, twice, and someone else had drawn a small sad face beside it.
Lloyd took the memo down that morning because the tape had lost its grip and the corner kept flapping into his face while he laced his boots. He folded it in half and then in half again and put it in his shirt pocket behind his notebook, which was not a decision about anything, only a way of getting it out of his face.
He was fifty-one years old. He had been a police officer in the city of Fallon for twenty-four of those years, and for the last two he had been a Park Ambassador, which was a title somebody in the mayor's office had invented to make a foot beat sound like hospitality. He wore the same uniform as everyone else, but with a green patch on the left shoulder showing a tree and the letters DID, for the Downtown Improvement District, which paid for a third of his salary and therefore, in a way nobody said out loud, a third of his attention. He had a bad left knee from a foot chase in 2009 and a good right knee that had been compensating for it for so long that it, too, was beginning to file complaints. He had an apartment on the east side with a balcony he never used and a son in Columbus who answered his texts about one time in three.
Roll call was at seven. The briefing room on the second floor of the Central District station smelled the way it always smelled in October, of the first run of the radiators burning off a summer's worth of dust. Sergeant Dina Kwiatek stood at the front with a clipboard, a tall woman in her forties with reading glasses pushed up into gray-streaked hair and the patient, slightly ironic face of someone who had been asked to make bad ideas work for most of her career.
"Last day of the sweep," she said. "I know. Contain your grief." She flipped a page. "Spencer Stolte from the DID is going to be in the square this afternoon with a couple of people from the mayor's office, and they're going to walk through, and they're going to look at the benches, and they're going to look at us. I've been told, and I'm quoting, that the district is concerned our numbers on the Tollis Square side do not reflect the volume of complaints." She looked over her glasses at Lloyd. "Vartanian. You've got Tollis. You've written four this week."
"Four's a lot of paper."
"Brockman wrote nineteen at Riverfront."
"Brockman wrote nineteen at Riverfront because there's a camp under the Kessick Street bridge with thirty people in it and the city's been trying to clear it since June. I've got Cornelius and his chess set and Lavonne and her cart and a guy who feeds the pigeons."
"The guy who feeds the pigeons is in violation of a posted rule," Kwiatek said mildly. "There's a sign."