“Now, that’s a long story. C’mon, Lorenzo, you know I’m good for it.”
Lorenzo had a soft spot for George, believing that his problem was mostly arrested maturity.
“Don’t you give him nothin’,” Miss Dotson muttered and, wielding the remote, changed the channel.
Downstairs, Lorenzo went hunting for the Convoy brothers but was sidetracked once again, this time by Millrose Carter, the Man Who Never Sleeps. Millrose was squatting on his hams in the breezeway of Four Building, elbows on knees, ignoring all the chaos around him. Catching Lorenzo’s eye, he pointed skyward.
Lorenzo took the elevator up first, knowing that Millrose would give it a few minutes before following. The guy wasn’t supposed to be on the dance card tonight, but Millrose, who lived off a VA disability pension, was in the street all day, all night, one of those presences that the people of a neighborhood tended to christen the Mayor, and his beckoning gestures in a situation like this were to be heeded.
Taking the stairs from the top floor to the roof, Lorenzo passed Eight-Ball Iovakas and one of the Gannon cops walking Roosevelt Tyler, hands cuffed behind his back, down to the elevator. The two cops were holding him steady by the elbows, the warrant between Eight-Ball’s teeth.
“Lorenzo!” Tyler barked with desperation. “You said I got a get-out-of-jail card, man.”
“Yeah. If you produce.”
“How can I produce if you motherfuckers got me in cuffs.”
Eight-Ball took the warrant out of his mouth. “You got something? Now’s the time, my man. Today’s that rainy day.” Tyler worked his lips, trying to make something from nothing, but all he could produce was a dejected sputter, like a dying outboard motor. “Yeah, see, that’s not good enough, Tyler.”
The three of them continued their downward journey and Lorenzo climbed on, not liking Tyler enough to get all agitated by his dilemma.
From the roof of Four Building, Lorenzo watched a Conrail train chug past the media camp, the engineer waving, blaring his horn, drowning out half a dozen TV reporters who were standing with their backs to the houses, trying to deliver reports to the cameras. He saw at least one exasperated newscaster drop his mike and wing some gravel at a boxcar.
The roof door banged open, and Millrose stalked out onto the tar looking agitated, bouncing on the balls of his feet and pacing like a panther. His given name was Edwin, but he had been tagged Millrose, after the track-and-field games, because he gave off the vibration of a man perpetually poised to bust out of the blocks.
And as far as anyone knew, Millrose did not sleep. At all. Lorenzo had taken him to the medical center years back, when he had developed pleurisy one winter, and he had created a minor sensation by staying wide-awake for all four days of his hospitalization. The doctors had begged him to enter into a sleep-deprivation study, but he balked when they were unable to pay him for his time. The lack of sleep never seemed to affect his energy or the clearness of his eye. The only visible problem was that, although he was only thirty-seven, most people took him for an athletic sixty-year-old.
“Yeah, OK, here we go.” Millrose was taking off. “I got a goodie for you. A real goodie. Loud, common, stupid-ass, ignorant people, I’m gonna give you a whole neat package right next door to me. Set up shop, right in the house. Right on the other side of my goddamn living room wall. Comin’ over knocking on my door, ask me if I want to juggle for them. Me.”
Lorenzo eyed his watch: two-forty. Brenda would be at the end of Pierre’s first rough sketch by now.
“Ask me to juggle? I been clean for six goddamn years, so wrong question, wrong question. See now, the best time to hit them is when the lounge closes, you know, the Camelot? Because they working out of there till two, three in the morning, but then they come back, sell right out the house, you know, till whenever.”
“Can I buy out of the house?” Lorenzo asked, the old narco man coming out in him despite everything.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Millrose was almost hopping up and down. “See, I would cop for you, but I’m scared of it. I ain’t scared of them. I’m scared of it.” He charged to the edge of the roof so abruptly that Lorenzo’s heart lurched, but Millrose was chugging back the other way before he could grab him.
“See, I ain’t goin’ near that shit no more. I’m tryin’ to build me a life, you know what I’m saying? So no, no, no, fuck that shit. I’m gonna give ’em to you on a silver platter. Give you that whole skeleton crew.”
“How much weight can I buy?” Lorenzo decided to keep his eyes off Millrose until Millrose started giving it up about the carjacking.
“A lot.”
“You got any names?” Lorenzo looked back out over the projects. A few of the TV crews were erecting dioramic scaffolds, like puppet theaters; some kids, despite the hour, were still at the fence, bullshitting with whoever would talk to them.
“Damn, that boy’s name just passed through my head. I’m looking right at his face right now in my mind. Damn. Well, I know one—Stanley Johnson. Now he’s gettin’ ready to do eighteen months so you know he don’t give a fuck. Skinny-ass, braid-headed, light-skinned motherfucker—”
Enough. “Millrose. I need help with this thing down here.” Lorenzo pointed to the pocket park.
“Carl…Peters. That’s the name. He goes across the river, he gets himself no less than a hundred bundles, maybe a quarter ki’s worth a rock at a time. I’ll give you that whole skeleton crew. Asking me to juggle? Homey ain’t stupid. Homey lookin’ out for the home team. I don’t want that next to my house. They squatters too.”
“You call the board of health?” Lorenzo was getting sucked in again, remembering how much he loved straight-up buy-and-bust narcotics, wishing he were working it right now.
“See, that ain’t gonna do shit, because Eric Peters? You know, Carl’s brother? He works for the board of health. See, on one hand I don’t give a fuck, ’cause I’m getting ready to live with my sister in South Carolina. In fact, come the first of next month, you ain’t never gonna see me again, because you can work down there, if you ain’t allergic to the concept, but these next-door bastards, they got to go south before I travel south, and that’s all there is to it.”
Millrose abruptly stopped chugging and charging, shifting so suddenly into a serene and distant mode, standing there now almost languidly, gazing out over the projects, that it seemed to Lorenzo that someone had turned off the guy’s switch. He stared at Millrose for a long moment, waiting.
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Yes.” Millrose bobbed his head once, blindly reached into his jacket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.
Lorenzo laughed, incredulous and angry. “You pulled me all the way up here for that?”
“Yes.” Millrose tossed a match off the roof, smoke streaming out his nostrils.
“And you ain’t got nothing for me up here about this?” Lorenzo stabbed a finger toward ground zero.
Millrose sighed and turned to him. “Listen up. I’m gonna work on that because I hear you under the gun with it, but let me ask you something. What’s more important—this shit I’m telling you about right here? Or that white kid down there, you know what I’m saying? I ain’t a heartless individual, but what’s that song? ‘One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show’ You ought to do yourself a body count, my brother. But I will work on it because I love you and I know you got to deliver… Peace.”
Lorenzo charged out of the building, livid and panicked—oh for two and almost 3:00 A.M. He hated when anyone pulled that brother-man shit on him, telling him to get his priorities straight. One monkey don’t stop no show. If Millrose was so goddamn smart, how come he couldn’t figure out how to get a good night’s sleep?
Fucking snitches. Lorenzo resented how they always tried to use him, like some kind of all-purpose Frankenstein—the hours killed just bobbing his head, listening to their long-winded bullshit until they finally got around to coming across with the goods. A snitch always prefaced the information you need
ed by announcing his travel plans, telling you how he didn’t give a fuck about these people he was about to burn, because he was leaving town at the end of the week, the end of the month, before the holiday. Going to live with his brother, his sister, his uncle, his cousin, and going south, always going south.
As he headed for the exit corridor he and Leo Sullivan had agreed on, Lorenzo passed a group of women and kids clustered around a Watchman TV, their heads clumped tight like a brace of balloons. He stood behind them as a woman from the Jefferson Houses, Rose Wilson, one of his long-ago girlfriends, spoke into a microphone on the rolling, flapping black-and-white screen.
“She was always there for our kids, you know what I’m saying? And she would bring that little boy to work here sometimes too. I mean, it’s a damn shame. I hope they catch that guy, I truly do.”
Lorenzo walked on, thinking this time tomorrow Brenda would be up for sainthood, thinking, One monkey don’t stop no show. Well, sometimes it did. Depended on the monkey, the shade of its fur.
The pressure was coming from everywhere—the bosses, the media, the other cops, even, at this point, from the tenants themselves—and, yes, there was a racial double standard at work here and, no, a white victim’s life was not more precious than that of a black victim. No one would ever say that, admit to that, any more than they’d admit to calling this part of the city Darktown, but the pressure was like a sandstorm, both overwhelming and subtle, the driven grains everywhere, sweeping people off their feet and inhabiting the finest cracks and crevices. Any impulse Lorenzo had to respond with surliness or truculence—any act or gesture he might have in mind to protest or resist the Red-Ball status of the Cody Martin abduction on the grounds of racist prioritizing—were as useless as attempting to reverse the direction of this storm with the wind power of his own asthmatic lungs.
As Lorenzo approached the Gompers Street exit and attempted to slide by the front bumper of the Gannon cruiser parked there, a young uniformed cop, someone he had never seen before, stepped into his path.
“Where you goin’, Yo?” The kid was big, his jawline wider than his temples.
“I’m going out.” Lorenzo flared up.
“Goin’ out? Nobody’s goin’ out. Who do you think you are?”
“Last time I looked I was Detective Lorenzo Council. Who the fuck are you?”
The kid, blushing furiously, instantly stepped off.
“Jesus, I’m sorry.” He shifted sideways to let Lorenzo pass, but Lorenzo just stood there glaring.
“Ain’t you even gonna ask for some ID?”
“What?”
“How the fuck do you know I am who I said I am.” Lorenzo gave it one more withering beat before walking through, offering no identification and bumping the kid on the way.
Lorenzo stood with Eric Convoy in the rear of the 7-Eleven parking lot, two blocks from Armstrong. Eric was finishing an orange soda and dabbing the corners of his mouth with the heel of his palm.
“That motherfucker Eight-Ball? He confiscated my car, come up to me an’ says I got five hunnert dollars in tickets, gonna hold my car for ransom unless I find Hootie for him. But fuck it, ’cause that car ain’t nothin’ but a two-hundred-dollar shitbox. Holding it for half a G… Take the motherfucker. I ain’t tellin’ them Gannon crackers shit and I know who shot JFK too, so you know I’m pissed.” He tossed the soda cup toward a full-up trash can.
“What’d you see, Eric. I ain’t got all night here.” It was three-twenty almost time to get Brenda from BCI.
“Yeah, I seen her come up all bloody an’ shit, you know, from the bottom end of the Bowl? But, Lorenzo, can I ask you something? Reverend Longway he’s trying to evict my moms, sayin’ I’m out there jugglin.’ But, like, number one, when I was doin’ that? It was downgraded to possession. Plus, I ain’t doin’ that no more. And number two? I ain’t living with my moms, I’m living with my grandmother, so you should talk to the rev, tell him what the story is, ’cause my moms is real sick right now.”
“What else you see down there?”
“Down where?”
Lorenzo didn’t answer, giving Eric’s brain a chance to catch up with his mouth.
“See down there, like what?” Eric asked.
“Like anything. Noises. Cars. Voices.”
“Nah, man. Just her coming up.”
“How ’bout your brother? Where was he?”
“He’s with me. He saw what I saw, didn’t see what I didn’t see. Listen, Lorenzo, could you give me a ride to the medical center? I want to check up on Tariq.”
“You think he saw anything?”
“Tariq? He might’ve but I doubt it. Maybe you should give me that ride and we can find out.”
Danny Martin pulled into the parking lot, rolled up alongside them, but stayed in the car, just sitting there glaring and helpless, his left arm hanging down from the window, fingers restlessly drumming on the outside of his door. Lorenzo got the feeling that he’d been aimlessly cruising D-Town since he popped Teacher.
“Anything?” Danny asked tightly.
“Not yet,” Lorenzo said gently, experiencing an unexpected wave of pity for him.
“Who’s this?” Danny lifted his chin, squinting. “Convoy?” Eric turned his head and looked off. “You hold back on this man, you best pray I don’t hear about it.”
Eric continued to give him the back of his head, and after a strained silence Danny finally pulled out.
“That motherfucker broke Teacher’s jaw,” Eric muttered.
“Nah, he didn’t.”
“Well, he shoulda kept his hands to hisself.”
“Yeah, well, Teacher shoulda kept his big mouth shut.”
“Yeah, well, there’s that,” Eric conceded, jamming his hands in his pockets and starting to walk away in the opposite direction from Armstrong.
“Where you goin’?” Lorenzo called out.
“My girlfriend’s house.” Eric turned to him, walking backwards now. “I ain’t goin’ back there,” he said, waving Armstrong off. “They got us penned in, you know what I’m saying? I feel like they roundin’ us up for something and I don’t like it. Yo, don’t forget to talk to the rev for my moms, all right?”
Oh for three.
Heading back to BCI, Lorenzo drove by a woman in the shadows of the Conrail underpass right outside Armstrong, a dangerous place to hang. Bent over almost double, taking small, waddling steps, she was scowling at the cobblestones, searching for something, aided only by the puny illumination of a disposable lighter. At first glance, Lorenzo wrote her off as a pipe head or a junkie hunting for the Baggie or vial she had just tossed because a cruiser had unexpectedly rolled by. But she was white, another white woman seemingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being a great believer in hunches, long shots, and luck, he pulled his car alongside her and threw it into park.
“You looking for something?” Lorenzo asked through the passenger-side window.
“I lost my heart,” she answered, not bothering to look up.
Lorenzo took a flashlight out of the glove compartment and left the car. He stood in front of her now, lighting the ground with his beam. She searched where the flashlight traveled, although she continued to keep her disposable aloft.
“What do you mean you lost your heart…”
“It was on my neck. It just broke.” She still hadn’t looked up at him. Three-thirty in the morning.
“You were at the projects there?” Lorenzo moved his light, looking himself now, not for a heart but for dope—something to squeeze her with.
“Yeah. I was seeing a friend.” She followed Lorenzo’s beam like a bloodhound.
“Your friend Tyler?” He took a shot.
“What do you think?” she shot back, unintimidated.
“You there about ten o’clock tonight?”
“When that lady got jacked?”
Lorenzo waited. After searching for another minute or so, she added, “If I seen that I woulda run right to Danny Martin, cash me in
a lifetime of chips.”
“You know Danny?”
“And he knows me.”
“You know his sister?”
“Can’t says I do.”
Lorenzo stepped back—time to pack it in—when suddenly she dashed forward, yelled “Hah!” and picked up a small gold locket. Lorenzo held the beam on her, the light giving the tiny heart that she held between her fingers a rich, molten glow. She was young, but her face had that caved-in, pugilistic profile of a longtime heroin addict.
“And you thought I was looking for dope, didn’t you?”
At 4:00 A.M. there were half a dozen shooters hanging around outside BCI. Word had obviously gone out where Brenda could be found, and Lorenzo hustled himself in through the garage before anybody could identify him. Pierre was sitting alone in the small room where Lorenzo had left them two and a half hours ago. He was studying a charcoal sketch of the jacker that he had taped to the front of the mug-shot file cabinet.
“Hey.” Lorenzo stepped in, looking around. “Where she at?”
Pierre tilted back in his chair and nodded in the direction of a defunct men’s room. Lorenzo knocked on the door and, when he didn’t get an answer, walked in. She was pacing from the cracked porcelain sinks to the bone-dry urinals, her face blocked by a curtain of hair. She moved with an anxious skip to her turns and she was flapping her hands.
“Brenda,” he said quietly, not wanting to spook her. She wheeled around with almost violent abruptness, hitting him with those gray, panicked eyes.
“What did you find?” she asked, seeming terrified of her own question. When all he could answer was “Everybody’s out there looking,” she wailed, “My hands are burning so much,” continuing to flap them as if trying to extinguish flaming match heads.
“C’mon,” he said almost in a whisper. He held out his hand. “Let’s go see Pierre.”
The drawing was of a delicately featured, almond-eyed male with the high forehead, thin nostrils, and small lips of an Ethiopian—the only bald black man under fifty years of age that Lorenzo had ever seen without a moustache or a beard. That aside, the face seemed tauntingly familiar to him, someone just outside his reach.
Freedomland Page 15
