Harlem Hit & Run

by Angela Dews

  “Maybe I’ll get back in time to hear some of the rest of the music.”

  He looked annoyed and relieved.

  C H A P T E R • 27

  * * *

  Al lived in the apartment on the ground floor of a brick and brownstone row house on 136th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Adrianne and I had to maneuver over the stones inlaid in front that were slick from the earlier rain. A fish tank was visible through one window. I hit the knocker and rang the bell and called out and heard something, but no answering welcome. Adrianne moved a paving stone and found the key. I stood in the recessed entryway under the parlor floor stairs and rang the bell again and then leaned against the filigreed wrought iron gate to hear what I could hear.

  I had to move out of the way so she could unlock it and we peeked in together and stood near the door, waiting to give Heavy time to get his business straight. I expected him to come out of the bedroom half-dressed. Young men, it would seem to me, would have need of a little privacy.

  The wall in front of us was full of color above a mess of spray cans. It took a minute to find Heavy’s name under the painted crowd.

  “It looks like he tagged Al’s wall,” Adrianne said.

  “It’s complicated. And it makes me sad,” I said. “But I like it.”

  A drum set sat in the middle of the floor, probably ready to go back in front of Heavy’s wall art.

  An industrial-strength metal rack held an audio system in six parts, several videotape recorders, two monitors and shelves of tapes. Al’s movie and music business must have been good for him to be able to afford the stuff. I knew what he made on his day job.

  Two long Chinese swords stood in an umbrella stand next to the shelf which also held other Japanese weapons, including nun chucks and a throwing star.

  On the other side of the room, a large canvas hung from one of its corners. A mess of coffee cans and brushes and hand tools filled one milk crate and two others were full of armatures to build sculptures on. A stone seemed to be standing upright on a rolling pedestal with some shaping that looked like movement; although it did not yet have a form.

  “I told you Al was making art again since he came back from the drug rehab,” Adrianne said. “Look at this place.”

  She walked over to the studio side of the room and bent down to gather some of the loose bills scattered on the floor. She turned to show me.

  I called out, “Heavy?” And I crept down the hall past the little kitchen and the bathroom.

  By the time I got to the bedroom, curiosity had beat out any bit of leftover embarrassment. I was hurrying, wondering what I would find next. Nosey and I busted through the door to find a man lying on the floor by the bed.

  “Adrianne, come here quick!”

  He was lying on his side in a blue velour Reebok tracksuit. I knelt to feel for the pulse in his neck. His body was warm and I could move his arm, but the blood wasn’t flowing. His heart had stopped pumping.

  His bare feet were dirty but well kept. Fit and young, he should have put up a fight. But there he was, just lying there like he was sleeping with an open eye staring out at nothing now that whoever it was he looked at last was gone.

  A baseball bat was lying next to him with something on it I didn’t want to look at too closely.

  I knew the routine, and without moving him, I saw the open wound in his head and the bruises and the cuts and swelling around his mouth. His lips looked like they would have healed crooked.

  I felt Adrianne kneeling beside me.

  “It’s Heavy, isn’t it?” I pitched my voice low and respectful.

  “Yes. Is he dead?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?” She touched his hands, felt for his pulse, and touched his neck. “Oh shit.”

  Then she said what it meant to her: “Not now. He . . .” Her voice cracked.

  “These are old bruises. I saw them last night when he was arrested on the street in front of the Kit Kat. And what happened tonight maybe didn’t hurt him because he was very high.” I pointed to two tiny empty clear plastic vials and one colored top. “What a waste. What a stupid horrible waste.”

  I got on my knees and found the phone under the quilt on the floor. From there I could also see under the king-sized bed. My view was not obstructed by anything except a precious few very small tufts of dust and Heavy’s sneakers where he must have kicked them off. And I saw Adrianne’s hands reaching down to pick up one of the empty vials. I looked up to watch her walk over to open the back door on the garden. She stood there looking out.

  When I picked up the phone there was no connection. I put the phone back on the floor and went to stand beside her.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

  I turned around, and it occurred to me I had heard some noise when we rang the bell. “Do you think somebody could still be in the apartment?” I asked her.

  I walked over to the closet and threw open the door. Nothing. We both reacted with nervous noise that was not laughter.

  “Adrianne? Don’t touch anything else. Can you give me a minute? I want to share something with Heavy. It’s a chant to Quan Yin, who hears the cries of the world. It’s something to carry him with compassion.”

  Adrianne said, “I want to sit with his art.” And she went back to the front.

  I chanted. Then, I went to stand in the back door where the smell of dirt was a rich mix, not yet frozen and kind of wonderful in New York City. I could still smell the rain.

  When I switched on the floodlight, it reached just beyond the pile of flagstone pavers near the door and illuminated part of the incongruous fairyland of Al’s tranquil garden space of empty branches and evergreens and a stone bench beside a silent fountain.

  He hadn’t finished paving the dirt path and I saw sneaker prints made by a kid, or a little grown person, running and sliding to where it was dark but where there wasn’t any place to hide.

  The large wooden box at the fence sent back the smell of compost in the humid air. The floodlight caught the night above the top of the fence.

  Back in Al’s bedroom, I stepped over the doorsill and felt a chill at the back of my neck as I looked down at the floor at Heavy, still dead.

  I called out, “Adrianne!” The silence got louder. “Adrianne!”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Adrianne, is that you?” She still didn’t answer, which meant it probably wasn’t her walking at the front of the house.

  I tipped over to the door and got outside and flipped off the floodlight and took off my shoes and ran in the dark, avoiding as best I could the path with the sneaker prints.

  At the back fence, I had to stash my beautiful black stilettos on top of the compost box to free my hands, and I had to hike the little skirt to my evening suit further up my thighs to free my legs for the climb on the step stool next to the compost box. Since I couldn’t see over the fence, I couldn’t tell if there was another backyard adjoining Al’s yard on the other side where I would be trapped once I went over. But climbing the wall was my only option.

  I got as far as the top of the box and I was commending myself when the floodlight went up and I heard a voice call out, “Stop! I suggest you come back here.”

  C H A P T E R • 289

  * * *

  I had the nerve to be mad, until I turned around and got a look at the silhouette of a man standing center stage with the light behind him. Even from there I could see his handgun reflecting the light and looking comfortable in his hand. It convinced me to abandon my attempt at escape over the fence, which probably would have been tricky anyway in the stupid skirt.

  I turned to get my shoes off the box.

  “Stop! Now! Put your hands up and come back here.”

  I walked again along the edge of the path in my stocking feet, avoiding the footprints. But he messed up the prints when he covered the last distance separating us and reached out to grab my arm. Then he dropped his hand.


  It was Bobby Bop. “This is close enough,” he said. “You can’t get anywhere I can’t reach with this.” And he gestured toward the fence with his gun. “Maybe we’ll go see what’s in the box.”

  “Oh please. Not the mud again.”

  “Move.”

  We walked to the compost box and he stood on the step stool and tossed me my shoes. I considered running, but he was right that there was nowhere to go the gun couldn’t reach.

  He opened the lid and damn if he didn’t find something. “Aha.”

  He used a stick to dig around some more in the box. When he didn’t find any more of what he was looking for, he hefted out a small suitcase. It looked dry but it had little wheels and the wheels were muddy.

  “I liked the show tonight,” I said. “It was just what I needed.” He didn’t answer.

  “How did you get away when the movie police busted us this morning?”

  He still didn’t answer. But I kept talking while we walked because it lightened the death-march aspect of our return trip through the garden. The wheels got muddier as he rolled the suitcase back.

  “Why are you here? Is that money? I overheard you and Al talking about making bootleg movies. Was he really making suitcases full of money? And how did you know?”

  We were at the door and we looked down at Heavy while time stopped.

  “He was a little wannabe hustler. Wasn’t going to have much else happen to him than this anyway,” he said.

  “Then why kill him?” I asked. It was a question to maybe start a conversation now that he was talking back, while I paid attention to the space I had to maneuver in. There was no way I was getting enough room to use the baseball bat, even if I could have made myself touch it.

  He wiped some of the mud off his Sly Stone concert boots on the carpet before he shoved me from behind down the hall. When we got to the bathroom, I reached in and grabbed one of Al’s thick towels. He waited while I wiped off the mud. I would have been taller than him in the heels but I didn’t put the shoes back on.

  When we got to the living room, he opened the suitcase. In it was money in batches wrapped with rubber bands nestled in bunches of loose bills.

  “Look at that,” I said for lack of anything better to say.

  He closed the lid and rolled it to the door.

  “Is that why you killed him?”

  “I didn’t kill him. I want people alive to pay me.”

  “You’re the loan shark. That was the loan you were talking to Al about.”

  “I’m a businessman.”

  “I thought you were a music man.”

  “It doesn’t pay the bills.”

  “Do you know who killed Heavy?” I asked.

  “He got paid to scare Cecelia and he killed her with the cab. Bunch of idiot niggers.”

  I didn’t expect him to tell me. It was probably not a good thing. But if he was talking, I needed to know.

  “Why? Why would somebody try to scare Cecelia?”

  “To make her shut up.”

  “About what?” I asked. “About the bank?”

  “Your newspaper let everybody know the bank wasn’t safe.”

  “Aren’t you curious to see how much is in the suitcase?”

  He stopped for a moment. “There will be time.”

  He turned to the business of searching Al’s inventory and picked up one of the videotapes. I was thinking about my options and they seemed like a precious few. I moved close enough to the rack and to Al’s throwing star sitting on one shelf. My teacher had given me a shuriken and instructions on how to use the eight-pointed star as part of my training.

  “I buy product. That’s good business. But I don’t like negotiating at a disadvantage,” he said.

  “Is that why you killed Heavy? He was just at the wrong place? He was just in your way?”

  “I’ve got a better story. Too bad you won’t be writing it Pearl Washington from the newspaper. I know this town. I went up and over the house today to get away from the bust. I always have a way out. And here’s one you’ll love. Whoever killed Heavy killed you too. Obviously.”

  I watched him turn back to the tape library.

  “I’m going to get a tissue out of my little bag.” The emphasis on the size of my beaded evening bag seemed to work and he looked up and then went back to another row of tapes. It was the last one. He squatted and hunched over to get a good look.

  While he was preoccupied, I slid the throwing star off the shelf and took it into my hand then closed my fist so only the points showed between my fingers. I held it against me behind my beaded bag. Sometimes an instinct takes over all the available space in my head. My instinct told me to walk over to the front door. But he had had the presence of mind to lock it.

  I turned two locks with one hand and felt it give.

  “Get away from the door!” He shouted and moved across the room fast and grabbed me. I turned to say something to distract him, something to continue the conversation we were having, and only managed to turn slightly away before he punched me in the face.

  I rooted myself, stepped forward, and my body drove my backhand to deliver the metal points of the throwing star between the knuckles of my hand, not into the lethal place in his throat, but into his cheek.

  He howled and held one hand to his face. I grabbed the limp wrist of the gun hand and used my knee to push him back. He stumbled and I watched the gun fly off down the little hall. He started for it. And I was out.

  There was really nowhere to hide on the sidewalk. When you see what people do on the sidewalk, you’re not that quick to hit it. I heard him coming. And, I flattened myself against the building behind the little bit of wall the Urban League had built to enclose their front stoop next door and waited. From there I could hear his footsteps running toward Seventh Avenue.

  C H A P T E R • 29

  * * *

  I gave Bobby a minute and then I stood up and ran the few steps to the corner where I could see him walking down Powell and rolling the small suitcase and with the bag of tapes in the other hand. He heaved them into his Caddy and drove away.

  I heard the deep comfort of a bass voice. “Probably going to the Kat if I know Bop.”

  I whirled around to find two men I didn’t recognize at first in the dark. One pushed a handkerchief into my hand. They were Daddy’s friends Riley and Joseph. I put the handkerchief up to my nose.

  “Better have your eye looked at. And you’ll need to pack your nose,” Riley said.

  “Listen to Riley,” Joseph said. “He knows about working in the corner on broken noses.”

  “Soon as you call the police. Somebody killed Heavy and the phone is dead in there too.”

  “Clarence is dead in there?”

  “He’s dead in there.”

  “Damn.”

  “How long have you been out here?” I asked them.

  “We stopped for a minute before we went to Ruthies to watch the Brooklyn Nets play some basketball. We saw Clarence go in. He had a bag.”

  “And when we came back and saw the gate open, we decided to wait and see what was going on and that’s when we saw you and Bobby running out.”

  “Did that son of a bitch do that?” Riley asked.

  “Yes. Bobby Bop punched me in the face.”

  Riley went to find a phone, and Joseph and I walked over to Al’s.

  While Joseph went down the hall to verify Heavy was dead, I wrote down what I remembered from the reels and videocassettes that were gone and a description of both Bobby Bop and what I remembered of Heavy and how he was lying—just to have them.

  “Heavy changed his clothes,” Joseph said, when he came back from the bedroom. “He must have a whole wardrobe of those suits. Maybe they were in the bag he brought in.”

  “Or, it might have been a bag of money. Bobby found a suitcase of money hidden in the back in the compost box.”

  “Maybe. But he always wears a sweat suit with a hood. But red. The sweats he was wearing was r
ed.”

  “Don’t tell the police the thing I said about the money. Okay?”

  We told the police everything else. They kept us in the living room in one area near the door and took samples from our hands and clothes. I heard Heavy’s injury described as traumatic head injury and the drug inventory to include marijuana, crack, Valium and fentanyl.

  While detectives were making field tests and taking pictures, Riley ministered to my face.

  When I was sitting across from the detective, he picked up a plastic bag with the throwing star in it and turned it over several times and touched his thumb against one of the 8 points. “Is this blood?”

  “No comment.”

  “You know I could get you for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree for this. It’s a class A misdemeanor to carry that thing around.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  He asked me again to describe the crime scene, now very much changed, compromised, he called it. He seemed surprised when I described it the same way as last time.

  “How do you know what’s missing? You said this was the first time you were here.”

  “I didn’t say I know everything that’s missing. I just know Bobby took some of the cans and videotapes with him.”

  I didn’t tell him about the money—not the loose bills Adrianne picked up off the floor or the suitcase of money in the compost box.

  “Miss Washington, you should buy a lottery ticket,” he told me. “You’re lucky he let you get away.”

  “I don’t know. Seems to me I’ve used up a lot of my luck. But not tonight. He didn’t let me anything.”

  When we walked outside, we got our pictures taken by the downtown news people.

  At Harlem Hospital, they described the gauze packing Riley had inserted as a professional job and my nose as not broken.

  At home, I slept iced and propped up with pillows.

  C H A P T E R • 30