The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

by Edited By Scott Turow

  Getting your johnson swabbed by a ‘hood rat for a couple of crumbs of low-grade rock — not even a nickel’s worth — wasn’t like being unfaithful, he figured. It was medicinal; therapeutic; a salutary necessity — more like a business expense. Like buying aspirins or getting a massage on a high-stressjob. But that was all past— the whores, the dealing, the violence, the stress. He had resolutely turned his back on “thug life” six months ago, when he realized that a brother, even an old-time G like him, was vulnerable to jail time or a hit — after he had experienced the deadly grotesqueries in which Pemberton was capable of entangling him.

  So, hours after that goddamn murder, months before he knew the cops were onto him, he’d flushed the bulk of his street stash down the toilet— 1,800 bindles — and threw away most of his thug-life paraphernalia, even his jack-off books, Players and Hustlers mostly, and, his cherished Big Black Titty magazines and, faithfully (except when the Lakers were on TV, or Fear Factor, or The Sopranos), got down on his knees and read the Bible with Bea and promised to her on his daddy’s life, and on his granddaddy’s soul even, he wasn’t going to disappoint her anymore. No more drug-gin’, no more whores, no more hangin’ out. No more street. Swear to Jesus . . .

  “White folks like white stuff,” Bea had explained in the wee morning hours before he surrendered himself. They were in the bedroom of their new Woodland Hills bungalow, and Bea was standing behind him on her tiptoes and pressing her breasts against his back as they faced the dresser mirror. “They like white houses, white picket fences, white bread, and white shirts,” she added grimly, peeking over his shoulder to admire her husband and herself in the mirror.

  They both looked so sad; so pitiful and wronged, Bea thought. And all because of that shit-for-brains Pemberton. Fat Tommy thought so, too. Recalling those poignant scenes on that morning, he remembered that they’d both cried a little bit, standing there perusing their innocent, sad, sexy selves in the mirror. Little Bea had slipped from view a moment as she helped Tommy struggle out of his nightshirt and unfastened for the final time the nine golden ropes of braid that festooned his massive neck, and then his diamond ear stud. Bea tearfully placed them in a shopping bag of things they would have to hock. She slid the voluminous dress-shirt sleeves over his backswept arms. Then her beautiful, manicured hands appeared, fluttering along his shoulders, smoothing out the wrinkles in his new shirt.

  When Bea was satisfied with her effort, she slipped around in front of him and unloosed his lucky nose ring, letting him view her voluptuous little self in the lace teddy he’d bought her for Mother’s Day, but which she had seldom worn. Then, while he was distracted ogling her melons, she had seized his right pinkie finger, whose stylish claw he had allowed to flourish there as a scoop for sampling virgin powder on the fly and which he had rakishly polished jet black, and before he could stop her, she deftly clipped it off. Fat Tommy shrieked like a waif.

  “It’s better this way, Tommy,” Bea assured him. She carefully placed the shorn talon in a plastic baggie. It resembled a shiny black roach; but for Fat Tommy, it was like witnessing the burial of a child.

  “I’m keeping this for good luck, Tommy,” she told him, and stowed it in the change purse of her Gucci bag.

  She patted his lumpy belly, which protruded out of the break in the shirt like a fifty-pound sack of muffins. She buttoned up the shirt and put on the new hand-painted Martin Luther King Jr. tie she had especially made for him by a Cuban chick she had met in rehab. She cupped his big pumpkin head in her hands. She had paid her little sister, Karesha, fifteen bucks to touch up his Jheri curl, and the handsome, thick, mane of oily black locks cascaded sensuously, if greasily, down his forehead and neck.

  “Try to stay where it’s cool, so the Jheri-curl juice don’t drip on your brand-new shirt, baby,” Bea said in a sweetly admonishing tone.

  “This new ProSoft Sport Curl Gel don’t drip like that cheap shit, baby,” Fat Tommy explained. “It’s deluxe. I gave your sister two more dollars so she would use the top-drawer shit. I want to make a good impression.”

  “I know you do, baby. But you’re gonna have a hard time keeping it up in the joint... I don’t think you —”

  Her husband had stopped listening and Bea stared once more into Fat Tommy’s eyes. He was such a big baby. Standing there he had reminded her of a holy card she had cherished the two years she went to Catholic school before she met him. St. Sebastian, sad and pitiful, mortally wounded, innocent and wronged, pierced with arrows. She kissed him lightly on his shirt front and pushed him backward onto the edge of the bed.

  “Pull yourself together, Tommy. I’ve got to go drop off the kids,” she said.

  Fat Tommy was still crying, sitting dejectedly on the side of the bed, long after she had dressed and gone out to drop their boys at her sister’s new hideout in Topanga Canyon.

  ~ * ~

  2.

  It was still dark when Bea went out. The sun soon poked up. She hardly even noticed. She sped along the freeways, and the awakening valley skies unfurled before her in desolate pink banners of light. She raced over the back roads, hurtling through space along the crests of the canyons. Again and again she skidded in a cloud of dust against the shoulders of the abyss. Again and again she slowed down a moment then, thinking better of it, sped back up. She couldn’t stop looking at her boys, couldn’t stop cursing Pemberton under her breath and sadly reflecting on how that asshole had put them all up to their eyeballs in shit. The boys woke up during the forty-minute drive over to Karesha’s, with Bea the whole time vainly scanning the radio for news of Pemberton’s arrest.

  Bea’s mother was standing at the window when she drove up. Her mother would drive the boys up to Santa Barbara and they would take a cross-country bus to Texas that night. The three women and the two infant boys cried until Bea’s mother drove off in Karesha’s pink Lexus, fleeing in plain sight, with Little Tommy and baby Kobe waving bye-bye from their car seats.

  After their mother and the boys were safely away, Karesha, a cold, deadly customer in most circumstances, confided to Bea that she was a little nervous about the possibility of her own capture or of the jailing — and inevitable execution — of her notorious former squeeze, Cut Pemberton, and what it could all mean for her Hollywood plans, and for her high-toned, social-climbing crew.

  “You heard from him?” Bea had asked, as she backed out of the dirt driveway in Karesha’s rented, brush-covered hideaway.

  “I hear the Columbian’s got him,” Karesha said quietly. “The cops don’t know much about him yet. I’m sure he wants to keep it that way. Anyway, I trashed the cell phone.” They were quiet for a moment, then Karesha said, “But if that sick motherfucker come ‘round here I’m gonna send him to Jesus.” She lifted her T-shirt and showed Bea the pearl-handled .22 Pemberton had bought her as an engagement gift. It was stuffed in the waistband of her jeans.

  When Bea arrived back home, the neighbors were out, watering their lawns, pretending they didn’t know Fat Tommy was a prime suspect in a vicious murder.

  “How do, Miss O’Rourke?” Pearl Stenis, the boldest of her nosy neighbors greeted her.

  “I’m blessed, Mrs. Stenis,” Bea said flatly.

  She pulled into the garage and closed the door. She gathered herself a moment before she got out. She turned on all the lights in the garage and found a flashlight, and took a good twenty minutes making sure the Mercedes was clean of diapers and weapons and works and blow and any incriminating evidence. When she was done, she poked her head into the house and called out, “We’re late, Tommy. We’re supposed to be there at eight o’clock sharp — it’s already eight forty. I’ll be in the car. Come on, baby. We got to be on time this time.” She waited in the car and honked the horn a half-dozen times but had to come back inside and get Fat Tommy. She found him back in bed, fully dressed, sobbing, with the covers pulled over his head.

  “Where the hell you been, baby?” Fat Tommy said. “I thought Cut got you.”

  “That n
iggah better be layin’ low,” Bea said. “These Hollywood cops would love to catch a fuck-up like that and Rodney King his ass to death for the savage shit he done.”

  “It just ain’t fair,” Fat Tommy complained.

  “Listen here, Tommy,” Bea said sternly. “You don’t deserve this beef. You don’t know nothin’. You didn’t see nothin’. You got a wife and family to protect. It was that goddamn Cut that fount Simpson. You didn’t even know he was a cop. It was all Cut’s idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t. . .”

  Fat Tommy began sobbing again. After a few minutes, he confessed that he had raided the emergency stash in the bathroom and had done a couple of lines to calm his nerves. He suggested that they do what was left. There was only a half-bindle left anyway. He never did crack; the high felt like a suicide jump. Crack was for kids; toxic, cheap-ass shit meant to sell, not do. Fat Tommy was old school — White Girl all the way. Powder, he believed, was classier, mellower than rock cocaine.

  Bea retrieved the emergency bindle out of the bottom of a box of sanitary napkins where she and Fat Tommy stored it. There was only a portion of an eight ball — an eighth of an ounce — left from the half-pound Fat Tommy liked to keep around the pad for Laker games and birthdays and other special occasions. Bea used her mother’s Sears card to line out six hefty tracks of the white powder on the dresser top. Rolling their last hundred-dollar bill into a straw, the couple snorted quickly, sucking the lines of blow into their flared nostrils like shotgun blasts fired straight to the back of their brains.

  Quickly, the drug began to take effect: it eased its frigid tendrils down the back lanes of their breathing passages, deadening the superior nasal concha, the frontal and sphenoid sinuses, creeping along their soft palates like a snotty glacier before it slid down the interiors of their throats, chilling the lingual nerves and flowing over the rough, bitter fields of papilla at the back of their tongues and ascending, like a stream of arctic ghosts up through their pituitary glands, their spinal walls and veins, and into the uppermost regions of their brains. The pupils of their dark brown eyes became dilated and sparkling.

  “Damn, that’s good shit,” Fat Tommy said, feeling the cold drip of the snow, liquefied and suffused with snot, glazing the commodious interiors of his head and throat.

  Fat Tommy shut his eyes tight. The darkness inside his mind began to fill with amorphous, floating colors. His big body seemed to be shapeless and floating, too. He looked down at the drifts of sugary dust remaining on the dresser. Almost four hundred bucks’ worth of Girl — gone in six vigorous snorts. As Fat Tommy admired the smeared patterns of residue on the dresser top, Bea leaned down and broadly licked the last thin traces of powder.

  Then she swept her lovely, manicured, forefinger across the dresser top, along the trail of spittle her tongue had left, sopping up the final mists of blow. She dabbed this viscous salve along her teeth and gums. Normally Fat Tommy prided himself in always managing to lick up the leftovers before Bea got to them. But he was immobilized with grief; and too, he was froze from his nose to his toes. Now Bea was froze numb, too. The coke was ninety percent pure. It’d only been stepped on once. Chilean. Cream of the Andes. Bea blinked hard and looked up at her husband.

  “I’m straight now,” Bea said, noting a half moon of white powder showing around the alar grooves of Fat Tommy’s right nostril. “Your slip is showin’, baby,” she said, and pointed to his reflection in the mirror. Fat Tommy pinched his nostrils closed, shut his eyes, and took a sharp snort. The lumps of powder were swept from the grooves in his face, shooting brilliantly past his nasal vestibules and septum in white-hot pellets of snot. His heart began to race. Neither one of them said a word for a few minutes. They closed their eyes and surrendered to the high. When Fat Tommy finally opened his eyes, Bea was staring at him with a beatific look on her face.

  “You look nice,” Bea said. “Innocent. . . Don’t let ‘em punk you, Tommy. Just wear the shit outta this shirt and tie. Dr. King’ll bring you through. All business. You know how to talk to white folks. Don’t go in there like no G...talking all bad and shit, like you was that goddamn Cut. That’s what they want. Give them your A game, and you’ll be all right. Remember. You wasn’t there. You didn’t see nothing. You don’t know nobody. We ain’t gonna get kilt over some asshole.”

  Fat Tommy got in the car, gripping his Bible, sobbing and praying and assuring Bea and the Lord he loved them. He promised — between his sobs — he would savor her instructions and repeat them like a mantra: Don’t say nothing that’s gonna get us kilt over some asshole. She reminded him that his stupid-ass Uncle Bunny had done a nickel at Folsom on a break-in after Bunny talked too much. So — don’t talk too much. Don’t do nothing that will make you look guilty. They got nothing, Bea reminded Fat Tommy. That was the bottom line. They agreed if he was cool and smooth he had a chance to ease his way out of the beef with short time.

  ~ * ~

  3.

  The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation. They interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy told them he didn’t “need no lawyer.” He wasn’t guilty. The cops didn’t seem to be concerned about his coke business so much as they wanted to find out what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop— Simpson — right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy’s home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy assured him he didn’t “have no ‘turf,’ not anymore, not in La Caja, not nowhere.” Moreover, he didn’t know anything about a cop killing.

  “We know you ain’t no killer, Moises,” Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. “But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you’re in bed with the Columbians. They’re all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name ... called you Moises. We got him on tape. He’s quite fond of you. Says you’re a big shot. You’re looking at some serious time if you don’t play ball, Moises . . . Play along and help us catch this killer . . . you’ll be all right. . .”

  Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.

  Fat Tommy said, “That was sure nice of her.”

  “Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That’s the last of it... we need to get started,” Vargas said, and smiled at him.

  Braddock took the empty cup, crushing it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.

  “Great shot,” Fat Tommy said. “Three-pointer.”

  Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: “This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA special agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O’Rourke, a.k.a., ‘Fat Tommy’ O’Rourke, a.k.a., Tommy Martin, a.k.a., Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a., SloJerry-T, a.k.a., Bigjerryjay, a.k.a., T-Moose, a.k.a., Moises Rockafella...”

  “Uh, my name ain’t Moises,” Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. “Some bad people started calling me that. But I don’t let nobody call me that no more.” He tried his sexiest grin.

  Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: “This a homicide investigation under Police Report number A-55503. Today’s date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 1349 hours.” Then Vargas looked at Fat Tommy and said, “Could you state your name once more for the record?”

  “I’m Thomas Martin O’Rourke.”

  “Address?”

  Tommy gave them his parent’s address. That’s where he got his mail now.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four, officer,” Fat Tommy said.

  “Employed?”

  “I was assistant manager at the Swing Shop
...”

  “Was . . . ?”

  “I got laid off.”

  “When was that?”

  “1992.”

  Dockery and Braddock rolled their eyes, then Vargas said, “What were you doing after you got. . . laid off?”

  Fat Tommy fingered his Martin Luther King Jr. tie. “Odd jobs, here and there ...”

  “What kind of odd jobs?”

  “Church stuff.”

  “Church stuff?”

  Fat Tommy sat up straight in his chair. “I’m a Christian, sir. And I try to help in the Lord’s work whenever —”

  “You get that fancy Mercedes doing this church work?”

  “Naw.” Fat Tommy laughed out loud.

  “The street tells us you’re a big-time coke man — that true, Moises? You a big time coke dealer, Moises?”

  “Oh no, sir. Not no more. All that shit is dead ... I mean, all that stuff is dead ... I don’t do no drugs no more. I don’t sling coke no more. I got a wife and family..