‘Let go of the gun,’ he tells Amelia. But his finger’s already tightening on the .38’s trigger. He’s out of words and now it’s a matter of will. He orders himself to squeeze down, but he can’t. He can’t and he can’t and he can’t. And then he does.
TWENTY-TWO
Hootie steps into a pair of wool slacks and pulls them on. He zips up and fastens the top button, finally slips a braided belt through the loops. Though he’s worn the slacks before, he can’t get used to how soft they are. His prior experience with woolen garments has been limited to the itchy suits he wore to church. At his mom’s insistence, of course. These slacks, a wool–silk blend, are as soft as velvet. And they fit him perfectly, falling in a straight line to the tops of the tasseled loafers he steps into.
As he often does these days, Hootie pauses to examine himself in a full-length mirror on the back of a closet door. He’s been working out three times a week for the past month and it’s beginning to show. His chest and abs are sharply defined, his shoulders rounded. When he finally pulls a silk T-shirt over his head and tucks it into his trousers, his torso divides into a series of planes, though the charcoal T-shirt is not at all tight.
Hootie runs his fingers through his hair. Inky black and thick, it curls to the tops of his ears, complementing a deep tan. These days, he’s getting second looks from women who wouldn’t give him a first look when he was a confused teenager named Hootie Hootier. Back before he transformed himself into Judson Two-Bears Hootier, multiracial and proud of it.
Anyone you wanna be, he tells himself. That’s his mantra, now. Say it and say it again, until you finally believe it.
Hootie completes his outfit by slipping into a suede jacket. The gray jacket is rumpled by design, and it took Hootie a while to get used to the fit. Given its cost, he figured it should cling to his torso, a second skin. But he sees the point now and he’s glad he took Pete’s advice. This is New York. Tight-ass is for stock brokers and corporate lawyers, not young entrepreneurs with more balls than bankroll. Because that’s what Hootie’s become, or at least the part he’s playing. Eager for risk, ready to throw those dice.
With a last glance, he walks to a window, one of two in the tiny apartment. The window is open slightly and the draft on his face and his hands is noticeably cool. It’s well into September now, nearly two months since the police discovered the bodies of Amelia Cincone, Brian Moore and Sherman Cole in a very fancy house in the very fancy neighborhood of Bayside Gables.
The house, the neighborhood and the white victims were enough, all by themselves, to excite the media vultures. But with no arrest for the homicides and the cops leaking tidbit after tidbit, the story simply exploded. The hidden room in the basement, the video equipment and the DVDs came first. Then the news that a joint NYPD–FBI team had broken the encryption on Cole’s hard drive, yielding a treasure trove of names and addresses. Finally the biggest scoop of all when Amelia was tied to Bubba Yablonsky, now awaiting a parole hearing on Rikers Island. A columnist in the Daily News openly accused Bubba of pimping his stepsister.
Outside, the day has a picture-perfect feel to it. The sky is intensely blue, the small scudding clouds milky white. Scarlet at the edges, the leaves of a maple on the lawn are just beginning to turn. Hootie glances up the street, then crosses the room to the apartment’s single upholstered chair. He sits down and picks up the storyboard lying on a table to his left. Hootie worked long and hard on the storyboard, blocking out the half-minute commercial almost second by second. Along the way, he discovered a minor talent for drawing and the storyboard has a professional feel to it. This is important because preparing the storyboard would cost thousands of dollars if they had to farm the job out. That’s another lesson Hootie’s absorbed as he read book after book on television marketing. Whenever possible, do it yourself.
But right this minute, Hootie’s unable to concentrate. He closes the storyboard and walks back to the window. There are times, and this is one of them, when he can’t sit still, when Amelia’s quick grin and Bubba’s relentless optimism whip through his consciousness, relentless as demons. Even as he pulls aside the curtains, some corner of his mind searches for alternatives. He and Bubba arriving before Cole’s partner got Amelia out of the apartment. Amelia welcoming them as rescuers. Amelia giving up, lowering the gun.
Not that Hootie blames himself for what happened. No, to his way of thinking, Amelia and Bubba should have confirmed Cole’s identity before moving forward. They’d gone so far as to photograph the house. They might have waited around long enough to discover who lived there. And there’s something else, too, something Hootie discovered online. Kallmann syndrome can be treated with hormones. If Amelia still looked twelve after hooking up with Bubba, it’s because she wanted to look twelve.
When Peter Chigorin’s car enters the block, Hootie’s thoughts flash back to Sherman Cole’s basement, another post-traumatic tic. After pulling the trigger, he’d literally frozen. Not so the cop – or the ex-cop, now that he’s retired. Chigorin was pressing his finger into Amelia’s throat before the echoes died away, looking for a pulse that wasn’t there. Then he retrieved his gun and the cartridge casing on the floor, and dug the bullet that went through Cole’s head out of the wall. One, two, three. Like he’d plucked the sequence out of some training manual.
‘You saved my life,’ he told Hootie as he pocketed the shell casings, ‘and I’m not forgettin’. I owe you forever.’
Kneeling on the bed, stunned, Hootie didn’t resist when Chigorin took the .38, wiped it down and dropped it to the floor. Nor did he move when the cop pulled the metal box out of the safe and opened it to reveal stacks of banded hundreds and fifties, or when Chigorin transferred the money from the box to a camera bag. In fact, he might never have moved if Chigorin didn’t force the issue.
‘Time to go, Hootie.’ The cop hadn’t waited for Hootie to respond. He grabbed Hootie by the arm, yanked him to his feet, then dragged him down the hall and up the stairs to a window in the living room. Limping all the way. Outside, the sun had set and it was nearly dark. The street, for as far as Hootie could see, was deserted.
‘What we’re gonna do is walk out to the car, get in and drive away. Just like nothin’ happened.’
‘What about the shots?’ Hootie finally rediscovered his voice. ‘What if someone heard them?’
‘Then we’re fucked. But I don’t think so. You got a basement room with no windows, plus the walls are padded. That’s why the shots were so loud. The sound was trapped inside. But, hey, you think about it, there’s plenty that could still go wrong. Maybe somebody noticed us comin’ in, maybe someone’ll see us comin’ out. Or maybe some dog walker noticed the car. What I’m hopin’ is that the bodies won’t be discovered for a few days. That’ll make time of death hard to pin down.’
Hootie didn’t speak on the drive back to Manhattan, not until Chigorin parked in front of Bubba’s apartment house on the Lower East Side. At eight o’clock, the neighborhood was just getting into gear and the sidewalks were crowded. A group of smokers standing outside a bar spilled over the sidewalk, puffing away. Across the street, an enormous pit bull in a leather harness pulled a girl in a wheelchair toward First Avenue. Hootie tried to absorb what he saw, but he couldn’t get his mind out of that basement. Amelia hadn’t uttered a word, hadn’t even groaned as she pitched forward. It was like she’d given up, like she was looking for a way out.
‘Why are we here?’ he asked the cop.
‘You told me that you personally bought the surveillance cameras. That means you showed your face, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, if there are any receipts, we need to destroy ’em. Same for any computer hard drives. And those Cookinarts?’
‘What about ’em?’
‘You said they’re sittin’ in a warehouse. You know where?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s find out.’ Chigorin chose that moment to drop a hand to Hootie’s shoulder. His wide
grin split his face in half. ‘I don’t know about you, Hootie,’ he explained, ‘but I feel like a new man.’
Hootie slides into the passenger seat and shakes the cop’s hand. Chigorin’s drinking less these days, but his appearance hasn’t changed. The cheap suit, the cheaper tie, the scuffed shoes, the bull neck, the crew cut. Retired or not, the cop looks like a cop.
‘Judson, my boy,’ Chigorin says, ‘how ya feelin’ this morning?’
‘Never better.’ Hootie lays the storyboard on the back seat next to a boxed Cookinart, one of six prototypes manufactured to exacting standards. These suckers actually work.
They’re on their way to the studio/offices of Marty Martinez in Great Neck, a Long Island town just across the city border. After two decades in the advertising world, Martinez had opened his own studio, Inez Productions, in 2004. Cheap commercials designed to sell marginal products are Marty’s specialty and he was entirely reassuring over the phone.
‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ he told Hootie. ‘I’ve got it under control.’
Just as well, because Chigorin and Hootie have already purchased seven thousand Cookinarts and there’s no backing out now. They have to choose a studio and soon, before warehousing costs eat into their marketing budget.
‘I spoke to Nick Campo last night,’ Chigorin says.
Campo, the detective who inherited Bubba’s case, located the homeless man Chigorin first interviewed within a few days. His name was Leonard White and he picked Bubba out of a photo array and a subsequent line-up. When that didn’t satisfy the prosecutors, Campo dug up two more witnesses, both of whom saw Bubba kill the rat in the subway station, and an informant willing to swear that Bubba and the victim knew each other.
‘What’d Campo have to say?’
‘Bubba’s gonna plead guilty to second degree murder. In return, he gets the minimum sentence, fifteen to life, and the state won’t file extortion charges. But the main thing is that he’s not talkin’.’
Hootie nods, but doesn’t respond. The task force working the Bayside homicides connected him to Bubba early on, as he knew they would. When they asked to question him, as he also knew they would, he hadn’t resisted. That’s because a refusal, as Chigorin explained, would only excite their interest. But he’d stuck with the story he originally told Chigorin. He met Bubba for the first time on the subway platform and Bubba offered him a place to stay. There was nothing not to like.
Only a week before his interview with the task force, Hootie had visited Bubba on Rikers Island. By then, of course, Bubba knew that Hootie would testify against him. Hootie was there to tell Bubba that he had nothing to do with Amelia’s death, but he never got the words out.
Bubba was seated behind a Plexiglas partition when Hootie pulled up. He seemed even bigger than Hootie remembered, and far more threatening. The huge skull, small features and marble-hard eyes might have been cast in stone. For a long moment he stared at Hootie through the greasy partition, a stranger gauging another stranger’s intentions. Then he lifted a telephone receiver to his mouth.
‘Sooner or later, they’re gonna let me out,’ he told Hootie. ‘And when they do, I’m gonna kill ya.’
But Hootie wasn’t intimidated. In fact, he’d smiled, though he never doubted Bubba’s sincerity. One more thing to worry about? So fuckin’ what? And by the way, thanks for the warning.
‘Judson,’ Chigorin says, ‘you still with us?’
‘Was I spacin’ out again?’
‘Don’t worry, it’s natural, given everything that happened.’
‘Then what about you, Pete? You’re not having any problems I can see.’
Chigorin laughs. ‘Ya know, I was so sure that she was gonna kill me, it was like I was already dead. Call me Lazarus.’
Hootie echoes the cop’s laughter. ‘And what does that make me? Because I’m telling ya, Pete, when I look back on what happened, I don’t ask myself what would Jesus do.’
‘Why not? Jesus protects the innocent. I mean, I risked my career to save Amelia’s ass and now she’s gonna shoot me? No, you did the right thing, and when your time for judgment comes, you’ll be able to defend yourself.’ Chigorin pulls the car to a stop at a traffic light. They’re on Northern Boulevard, heading east. ‘Look, we have a little spare time. Whatta ya say we stop for breakfast? There’s a diner a couple of miles up, they bake their own muffins.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
Hootie glances into the back seat, at the storybook and the Cookinart. He tells himself that it’s time to focus, that choosing the right studio is vital, since they don’t have the money to remake the commercial. Still, Hootie’s thoughts remain focused on Bubba Yablonsky just long enough for him to concede that Bubba was absolutely right about one thing.
Every great fortune begins with a crime.
Cracker Bling Page 17
