So I went round to the back alley, intending to dry off in one of the rear rooms before making a grand, sartorially correct entrance. But before going into the stocky brick-walled headquarters, I spied in a back alley strewn with garbage a rastaman with Rapunzel-length dreads taking the kind of hits that would make a cricket ball wince. Two men held the rasta’s arms as a third delivered head and body shots; a fourth man watched, every so often punching numbers into an incongruously pink cell phone. To my shock and disgust, the assailants were cops. The sun was just rising, and the rain was still falling, and so it was hard to see exactly who was doing what to whom. But as I sprinted through the mud to offer assistance, the identities of all the figures in this drama soon became clear. I recognized the one delivering the blows as a man everyone called Officer Coconut, a sour brute with a roundish skull and wispy hair like his namesake; the man on the pink phone was my superior, Commissioner Manatt.
“Wa a gwaan?” I asked. (When I’m excited, my patois tends to come out.)
The commissioner put away his phone. The officers let the rasta drop and, limp as a banana peel, he tumbled into the commissioner, who pushed him roughly, face first, into the muddy ground.
“’Im two ears hard,” the commissioner growled, giving a dismissive wave to the beaten man.
With that, he lit a cigarette, looked at me, and laughed; his officers joined in. The commissioner had an acne-scarred face and a nicotine-stained voice and his laugh was anything but mirthful. I always did dislike him—never trust a man who enjoys wearing epaulets.
“A good mek ’im tengle up,” the commissioner continued. “Dat deh a fi uno!”
He thrust a soggy manila folder into my arms, flicked away his cigarette, and went into the station and out of the rain. His men followed him, with Officer Coconut shooting me a last smirk before closing the double doors behind him.
I bent over the rasta, rolling him faceup. He was shoeless, as usual, and his black shirt and jeans were caked in mud. And of course, though it had been a number of years, I instantly recognized his thick-featured face: the full lips, the flat pharaonic nose, the heavy serious brow. In fact, his looks very closely resembled my own. I knew him all too well, even better than the others.
“Do you have a spliff?” my brother Proof asked.
The commissioner had given me a case to solve on this, my first day in my exalted office. This was preemptive punishment, of course, an attempt to taint the golden bwoy before he became the heir apparent. Personally investigating a crime was substantially below my new rank, but after what I had witnessed in the alley, I quickly decided I couldn’t trust whatever was going on to anyone else. Officers all around stared as I led Proof through the station, and the buzz continued, like the sound of angry bees, as I ushered the mud-dripping dreadlock into my office. I had been set up in a glass cubicle that was less private than I desired, and smaller than I deserved given my new station. My office was full of light, but it might as well have been a dank dungeon with bars; I felt like I was both incarcerated and on display, like Rilke’s panther. I had moved in days ago, but I had yet to unpack my boxes, and I had put but a single picture on my desk. As Proof dried off and cleaned up, I pulled down the blinds in my fishbowl workspace, and then flipped through the manila folder to familiarize myself with the case.
The folder contained a small sheath of damp papers. On top was a Post-it from the commissioner’s secretary that the prime minister’s office had called—this case was high priority. Beneath that was a news clipping from the front page of the Sunday Observer featuring a woman, maybe twenty years old, with cocoa-colored skin and sea-green eyes with a slight Asian tilt. She had a long, lithe body and was looking back at the camera over her shoulder with a Mona Lisa smile. She was wearing red running shorts, track cleats, and a midriff-bearing, crimson jersey with the number 45. She had the sort of face that launched ships, the kind of behind that inspired dancehall hits, and a pair of legs that looked as sweet as stalks of sugarcane.
“Soledad Chin, the sprinter?” I murmured to myself. “She’s the vic?”
Proof was now doing some odd stretching moves that were something like yoga crossed with mixed martial arts. For a man who had just gotten the Rodney King kicked out of him, he seemed no worse for wear. “I kept my ears open the whole time the cops were doing their thing,” Proof grunted, as he arched his back. “Soledad left her room at the Marriott last night and never returned. Could be a kidnapping, could be something else.”
“I didn’t even know she was on the island. Every time I see her in the sports pages she’s at an American track meet in her Harvard uniform.”
“She left Kingston when her aunt died a few years back. She returned with a group of students as part of a cultural program—the International Returning Immigrants Exchange.”
“IRIE?”
“The PM invited her to be part of it. Jamaican-American makes good and all of that. A murder won’t be good for tourism.”
“I assume the commissioner brought me in because of my Cambridge connections. How did you get mixed up in this?”
“Chin isn’t just a world-class sprinter. She’s a math major. The cops thought there was some link. But I didn’t tell them anything. Which is why we had our little disagreement outside.”
It was too much of a coincidence that my long-lost brother turned up on my first day in my new position. Word of my promotion had no doubt hit the street; perhaps Proof wanted to check up on me and got caught when he got too near the station. In any case, I needed to find out what he knew. “So what can you tell me?”
Proof smiled. “Cockroach nuh business inna fowl fight.”
“Cho! You and I both know what you really are.”
“What’s that, braa?”
“You solved math problems as a teen that professors had been working on for decades. If you’re a rasta, I’m Peter Tosh.”
“And wa mek you so speaky spokey, Hahvard boy? You’re a poet, not a cop!”
He still knew how to press my buttons, and he was getting them all, like a child punching every floor on an elevator. My parents had given us both the choice to go to high school in America, but only I had taken them up on it. I remained stateside for college, completing my undergraduate degree in English literature at Harvard—but after my parents’ passing, I changed course and pursued a masters in criminology at Northeastern. Career sacrifice was the least I could do after what my family had suffered. “You didn’t have to stay here,” I admonished Proof. “And at least I came back.”
“You have this fancy office and you haven’t even unpacked. You know you don’t belong here.”
“And where do you belong? Do you even have an address in Trench Town?”
Proof spat at my feet.
Blood rushed to my head. “A fuckery dat,” I choked.
“Yu waan tess mi?” Proof replied.
And just like that we were teenaged boys again. I balled my fists and stepped toward him; he struck a pose I swear I saw in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In my rage I knocked down the one photo I had on my desk. It fell faceup, and the glass protecting it shattered. We both looked at it, and a certain calm came over the room. I unclenched my fists, and Proof bent to pick up the photo. It was a portrait of my parents shortly before the attack.
“We’re coming up on seven years,” I murmured.
“Six years, ten months, three days, nine hours, and twentyseven minutes,” Proof responded.
There was silence between us, and after a moment, I broke it. “What was that Xbox Mortal Kombat shit you pulled just now? You know karate?”
“I don’t know … karate,” Proof smiled.
There was a knock outside my office and through the shades, I could see somebody that had to be Officer Coconut—even his shadow had muscles. I turned toward the door to see what he wanted, but Proof grabbed my arm. Then he pulled out a cell phone and placed it on the desk—it was the same pink phone the commissioner had had before. Officer Coconut knocked on the
door again, a little louder this time.
I looked hard at Proof. “Wha! This has to be put into evidence. There are forms that need to be—”
“Cho! Don’t go all poet on me, Miss Lou. Are you running this case or are you running this case? We have about a minute to figure out what’s on this before they come through that door.”
I picked up the phone. “It’s locked!”
“The commissioner was trying a code to unlock it. I heard the tones that he was punching and figured out the numbers: 1092.”
“The files say she was born in October 1992 …”
“That was the commissioner’s mistake. Soledad was a math major. She’s too smart to pick a static number. If she wanted a code that she could change every few weeks, what number would be most meaningful to her?”
“Her 100-meter time?”
Proof nodded.
I tried variations on the number, each one a tenth of a second lower.
“Try higher. The files also say she’s been fighting the flu, throwing up a lot.”
The phone unlocked with 10.94.
Officer Coconut was trying the door handle again. “I can hear you in there! You have something that belongs to the commissioner!” he bellowed, rattling the glass windows.
Proof closed his eyes. “We have about thirty seconds. Do you have a spliff?”
“What? No. What are you doing?” I asked.
“Focusing. This would be easier with a spliff. Look at her text messages.”
“There are a couple from the commissioner. Looks like she didn’t answer any of them.”
“Sexting must be as far as fat boy got. What else?”
“Texts from Smith, Jean, Patton, Marple, Wolitzer, Bourbaki—”
“Bourbaki? What does that one say?”
“It’s blank. But she responded with a number: 423.”
“That’s likely a hotel room. A meeting place. Spike the message.”
The door burst open. Officer Coconut had kicked it and broken the lock. Quick as a spider, Proof grabbed Officer Coconut’s arm and used his momentum to throw him to the floor. Proof bent over the man; he was out cold.
“You just assaulted a police officer,” I said to Proof.
Proof stood up. “You can file your report later. We’d better get to where we’re going before the commissioner figures out we actually have some evidence.”
We took my car and drove through the rain. Soledad had been staying at the Marriott, but room 423 had been empty for a week; the closest hotel where that particular room was booked was the Pegasus, which is where we were headed. The rain was coming down even harder now and my Fiat’s wipers, even at the fastest setting, couldn’t sweep the windshield clear fast enough. All around us, the city of Kingston was a submarine blur of greens and browns and yellows.
I dived in: “You want to tell me where you’ve been for seven years?”
Proof ignored my question entirely, stole a glance in the rearview mirror as if he was looking for someone, and then lit up a spliff.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Ease up. Everything cook and curry.”
“I can’t have that in my car, mon. Did you tief that from Officer Coconut?”
Proof exhaled smoke.
“I get it. This is all Babylon and I’m a baldhead. So why are you on this case?”
“It’s hard for a mathematician to resist a puzzle. There’s something fascinating going on here.”
“Does this have to do with the name on the cell phone? Bourbaki? You know him?”
“I know his work. But him nah real.”
I looked at him blankly.
Proof took a long toke. “In the 1930s, French mathematicians collectively agreed to publish math papers under that pseudonym.”
“To avoid the Nazis?”
“Something like dat.”
“What’s going on here? Is this just about a missing girl?”
“One-one coco full basket,” Proof said.
Like many readers of the Gleaner, I’m sure, I did my time in the tourist trade. The Pegasus is where I worked, along with Proof, over a long slow summer in our youth when our more professional internships fell through. As we pulled up to the monolithic hotel now, memories flooded back into my mind of a juvenile bet we’d made over who could romance the most women during our summer break. When, early in June, Proof fell for Beatrice, an American tourist who checkmated Proof at chess (the only time I’d seen him lose) and then mated him without the check in the hotel sauna, I thought for sure that I would post the higher number, as he was entrapped by the bane of all playas: love. Proof always had a sentimental streak—he once nursed a baby hummingbird back to health. So I thought I had this numbers game won. But like most things arithmetic, when it comes to my brother, I lost anyway, one to zed.
As we entered the lobby, which was crowded with collegiate tourists with mango-orange tans, the ivory-uniformed doorman moved to stop Proof, who was barefoot with mud in his dreads, from going too far in. I flashed my badge, but the doorman refused to let my brother pass.
“I’m the assistant police commissioner!” I protested. It was the first time I’d said it out loud and, although I must admit it felt good, it would have felt even better had it prompted the desired response of shock, awe, and obsequious compliance.
“I’ll have to get the manager,” the doorman responded.
Proof just smiled, seemingly used to this kind of rasta harassment.
The manager, a red-haired black man with freckles, came striding over. It was Foster Forest, who had worked alongside Proof and me that same summer but had remained to rise up the ranks. He was an exuberant man whose every feeling could be read on his face as easily as an emoticon.
:-D
“Zed!” he called out, grinning and clasping my hand. (Unfortunately, word of my bet with my brother, along with the unfortunate results, had leaked out that season, resulting in an even more unfortunate nickname among people that knew me back then.)
“I’m the assistant police commissioner now,” I repeated. “My brother and I have business in the hotel.”
Foster turned to Proof, recognizing him for the first time.
:-o
“Wah! Proof Watson—a yu!” Foster blurted out. “Sorry bout the holdup!”
“Nuh nuttin,” Proof shrugged.
“Yuh changed, mon! I remember—sixteen years old, you rewrote the accounting program, boosted hotel revenue 20 percent! The Jamrock Genius! I always thought you’d win a Nobel Prize!”
“Actually, they don’t give Nobels for math,” Proof replied.
“I heard you got into Harvard, Stanford, MIT. You teaching now?”
“Not exactly. I have to learn about myself first, mon.”
“So you’re at UWI?”
“I’m in Trench Town. I smoke ganja, meditate, and play chess against tourists for money.”
:-/
Foster clearly didn’t know how to process that information and neither did I. But he seemed to be finished catching up with Proof, and turned to me. “Well, sorry for the caution before. It’s just that a few minutes ago we had an incident …”
“What kind?”
“A man with a face tattoo—like teeth or something—tried to use the elevator. When we started asking him questions, him leave. We called it in to the station.”
I took down his statement in a little more detail, but this was not good news. The whole thing sounded like the work of Lil Croc—one of the most feared posse leaders in the city. All of his men, as part of an initiation rite, were given face tattoos in the shape of crocodile teeth—one tooth for every year they were in the gang. Some of the veteran members of the group were so tatted up it looked like they were being swallowed whole.
I shook hands with Forest and then Proof and I headed to the elevators.
“The Island Einstein—back in action,” Forest called out after us. “Walk good, mon!”
Proof and I entered the elevator a
nd let the doors shut.
“I wish I had a spliff,” muttered Proof.
“Cho! Never mind that. Lil Croc’s men are poking around. We need to figure out his game.”
“You’re the cop. You tell me.”
“I know he wants to be an outlaw hero to the masses—like the Godfather, Rhygin, or Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come. He’s even sponsoring a track team.”
“There’s your answer. Getting Soledad to join would be a coup. The man keeps a dozen crocodiles in his yard—he’ll make her an offer she cyann refuse.”
The doors to the elevator opened on the fourth floor, and we walked briskly down the hall to room 423. I turned to Proof. “Let me do the talking. We have to follow procedure.”
Proof pulled an imaginary zipper across his mouth, but what reassurance I got from that gesture was swiftly undone when he performed a similar zipping pantomime over his eyes, ears, crotch, and buttocks.
I knocked twice on the door, but before I rapped a third time it swung open.
A short young man in heavy black glasses stood in the entryway. He was missing much of his left arm, which ended in a reddish stump just below his elbow.
“Bourbaki?” I asked.
“Excuse me?” the young man answered.
He looked Middle Eastern, and was wearing a long flowy shirt. “Who are you?” I asked.
“Albert Aziz.” He had a Middle Eastern accent too.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“This is my room.”
“No—what are you doing in Jamaica?”
“I’m a senior at Harvard. I’m with IRIE—the student exchange. Who are you?”
Kingston Noir Page 19
