Clockers, page 13
Rocco winked at Touhey, gauging his interest: he seemed absorbed now. “So they have this lady’s home number coming up on their board and they’re freaking out. The poor doctor’s talking to her on the air, trying to get her not to do anything. Meanwhile, the producer calls nine-one-one and for some reason they pass it on to Homicide. I take the number, get the phone company to get me the address, it’s in Guttenberg, which is Hudson County. But I’m bored, fuck it, I call the Guttenberg police, give them the address, I say, ‘Wait for me by the door.’ I go over, it’s a nice high rise, expensive, I’m up there with two uniforms, I bang on the door. I hear this lady inside: ‘Who is it?’ ‘It’s Rocco.’ She opens the door—pretty, young—‘Rocco who?’ ‘Rocco police.‘ My foot’s wedged in now, and I can see it in her eyes, home run, she’s the one. She says, ‘What’s the problem?’—not ‘Can I help you?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, but we have to come in.’ She says, ‘What about my rights?’ and I start pushing a little on the door. I say ‘Call your lawyer but we have to come in.’ She’s looking from me to the Guttenberg cops, I’m ready to knock her down if I have to, but then she says, ‘Just you.’ And the way she said it? Well…” Rocco paused, weighed clown a little with emotional memory, suppressing the desire to get up from the table right then and go home to be with Patty. “I was hoping it would be a false alarm, everything would be OK So I say, ‘Fellas thanks resume patrol ‘ I walk in nice place plants Levolor blinds Turkish rug. I see she can’t be more than twenty-two, -three. I go in I look out the windows first nothing down there no bundles so I iust start opening closets the refrigerator toilet tanks anywhere you could hide a dead baby, taking out suitcases—and she’s not saying? anything just standing there twisting? her hands I can’t find nothing I say Why am I here?’ She says ‘Why ‘ but guilty, You know? I see she’s got a big stereo system set up next to the TV. I just go over and turn it on, don’t touch the dial and of course it’s set to the station and we hear the phone-in pediatrician on the speakers I just look at her She says ‘There’s no baby,’ and I believe her.
“I’m looking at her now, her hair’s a mess, her face is all puffy from crying. She says, ‘Am I under arrest?’ I say, ‘Why’d you do it?’ She says, ‘You ever listen to that creep? He’s so…“Well, Mother, first I’d like to thank you for having the courage to call in with a question like that. It’s a hard question but a good question.” He’s a phony.’ I’m just looking at her still, I ask again, ‘Why’d you do it? You look like a nice kid.’ And she bursts into tears, says, ‘I’m so lonely.’ After a minute she calms down, tells me that the day before? She had an abortion, and the guy who knocked her up? Didn’t show up at the clinic, didn’t call, just vanished. She went herself, paid for it herself, came back home to an empty apartment, she’s all cramped up, in pain, miserable, she wakes up Sunday morning still with the cramps, the guy still didn’t call. She turns on the radio, starts hearing all these mothers calling in with these problems about babies, like, ‘Is it OK if they sleep in bed with me? Is three too early to teach them the alphabet? When I take them to the netting zoo is there any animal they could catch something from?’ And she got a little wiggy thought she’d rattle the guy’s cage so I figure what the hell’ this poor kid so I go into her kitchen’ make us some tea. We talked for like four hours and because I was’ kind of in rocky shape myself at that time So, I don’t know, we found each other The funny thine is when she gets pregnant by me? I start freaking out, remembering the circumstances of how we met I’m thinking Holy Christ what if what if Anyhow it turns out she’s a fantastic mother, meanwhile I’m the one now who feels like ‘Dear Doctor Seuss my kid is driving me around the bend,’ you know’? But she’s a fantastic mother fantastic Just fantastic…”
Rocco trailed off, furious at himself for telling the story that both he and Patty swore to keep to themselves, furious at himself for betraying Mazilli’s primacy as a confidant. It was just that the actor made him feel so off balance, so desperate to say, “This is me, this is what I know, this is who I am.” Maybe all movie stars had that power to effortlessly strip a person down, but Rocco was perfectly willing to serve up every shadow and angle of his heart if he could only get back a little of that recognition he had won earlier in the meal, re-experience the momentary sensation that his life was somehow of consequence.
“That’s wild.” Touhey was smiling, nodding, blatantly intrigued again. But Rocco couldn’t tell if it was the story or the desperation behind the telling of it that had captured the actor’s fancy.
Rocco briefly caught Mazilli’s eye and sensed that if they’d been alone now, Mazilli would have lunged over and punched him out. Rocco smiled sheepishly at his empty drink, thinking: Be my guest.
5
HOOD UP, Strike entered Ahab’s, the air dense with a burnt closeness, as if a fire had been put out just hours before. It was seven-thirty on a Friday night but the restaurant was nearly empty, no one seated at the handful of littered tables, one raggedy man at the stand-up counter running along the window, the guy breaking up a fistful of begged change into pennies, nickels and dimes, lips moving as he tried to tally up some kind of meal. In the kitchen—a long glinting stainless steel confusion sealed off from the customers by streaked and dull glass—the food handlers appeared in silhouette, moving around the fryers and heat lamps like shifting shapes inside a steam room.
Three people stood on line along the kitchen glass, and Strike watched them shuffle restlessly from foot to foot. They were silently fuming at the languid counter girl, who was wearing a blue tricot service smock and chewing gum so open-mouthed that her tongue flapped out like a third lip.
Strike held the .25 in his pocket. But what was he supposed to do, get on line, ask for Darryl and then shoot him through the service window, hoping no one would give a shit? The insanity of the situation made him feel as if he was sleepwalking, inhabiting strange skin.
A fat, balding white guy with long sideburns and a Fu Manchu mustache came out of the bathroom and got on the food line. He was wearing a fatigue jacket and ripped-up tennis sneakers. The guy rapped on the kitchen glass with a key as if signaling someone inside, and a moment later the counter girl was replaced by a tall, rail-thin kid with a flat nose. He wore a red nylon running suit, and a Lion of Judah medallion hung from his neck.
Strike stepped back, sliding out of the kid’s line of vision. It was Darryl, and the sight of him, the realness of him, made Strike want to fall down.
How to play this? What to do? Got to be got: maybe that meant something else, like a warning. Or a wounding.
The white guy asked for a Golden Mobie, a Coke, fries, and an eight-piece. Darryl served him up quicker than the girl would have, and the guy moved off to the stand-up counter with his grease platter, dropping a spray of loose change on the beggar’s army of coins and looking out into the parking lot as he tore into the glistening fish-burger.
The girl came back on counter duty right after the guy was served, and then Darryl emerged from the kitchen and quickly slipped into the bathroom. Strike saw the white guy furtively catch the reflection of Darryl’s movements in the window.
Eight-piece: there wasn’t any “eight-piece” on the menu. Eighth of a kilo was probably what he meant. Had to be, Strike reasoned, because an eight ball—just three and a half grams—wouldn’t be worth the risk of selling in such a public place. Strike also guessed they were using the bathroom for dope and money exchanges, given that Darryl was in and out in ten seconds, too fast to piss. Strike studied him, entranced with the vitality of his every gesture, the absoluteness of his existence. Tracking his silhouette behind the kitchen glass, Strike tried to believe that Darryl’s beating heart was a throw-down challenge to his own welfare and future and manhood. Strike tried to muster fury but only summoned a lightness in his guts: Darryl was so real.
The white guy returned to the bathroom for another ten-second trip, in and out, snagged his french fries on the way to the parking lot, got into a LeMans with Pennsylvania plates and disappeared out onto JFK.
What to do?
“Hey, Strike.”
Strike flinched, wheeling to face that fourteen-year-old girl Shanette, Sharette, that baby-fat girl, the one who was just dying to throw it all away on the pipe. She was still trying the same play, giving him the hungry happy face, that licky-lipped gleam.
“What you doin’ here?” the girl said, eyeing his clothes. Her gaze traveled up and down from hood to sneakers. “You gonna get yourself all dirty.”
Strike gave her his back and practically ran to the Accord. He drove with the windows open, as if the Ahab’s air had followed him into the car like a hellish breath.
But once he was clear of that sizzling choke of grease and fear, clear of Darryl Adams, he found himself coming into some kind of resolve again. He must have been dreaming to think he could do something right in the restaurant. It would only draw attention to Darryl’s job, make the cops think, What’s here? Still, how to play it?
Darryl lived in a shabby, mostly welfare-subsidized motel over in Tunnely that always had lots of business going on because of its proximity to the Lincoln Tunnel. Day and night, cars drove around back of the Royal Motel for dope or sex. It was a place of whispers, quick reflexes, and shadow play. Anything could happen to anybody out in back of the Royal; everybody there was either guilty or just about to be. Shootings, stabbings, robberies—the Tunnely cops spent so much time at the Royal that the management had once joked about giving squad cars a designated parking section.
Strike drove up I-9 toward Tunnely, wondering why Darryl would choose to live there, then remembering that Darryl didn’t get along with his mother too well either. He probably moved out in a huff one night, and where are you going to go to live after a fight? A motel. Darryl likely checked in on impulse and wound up staying. When you were on your own, it was easier to have just one room than a whole apartment, and sometimes Strike felt like giving his own place up, get a nice furnished room somewhere.
Strike drove up the ramp to the rear of the Royal, pulling in under the long second-story catwalk. A crowd of regulars hunched over the railing and watched the New York cars entering and leaving with the jerky frequency of customers in a 7-Eleven parking lot.
Strike turned off the ignition and sat there waiting for Darryl’s night to end. But what if he went out after work? What if he came home with a girl? What if … Strike thought of Rodney waiting on the news, waiting to judge his heart: This is my son.
Then Strike remembered he had heard somewhere that Darryl’s mother had moved back down to Georgia. Somebody told him that; who would have told him? Strike started thinking about his own mother, about how ever since he moved out of the house he never ran into her, even though he was working the benches in the same projects where she lived. He never saw his brother either. Maybe they were going out of their way to avoid him, always coming and going from the other end of the projects, Strike thinking, Is that good or bad? But did he really want his mother to see him overseeing business on the bench? Maybe she was just showing him consideration. He had said to her that his dealing was short term and that he’d end it quick, coming back to her rich and on the level, but now look what he was up to, sitting here outside this sinkhole with a .25 on his lap How would this lead to that? Rodney once said about Kennedy’ the President who the boulevard was named after, that his family made its first real money smuggling booze but Strike couldn’t imagine an American President starting out on the road to respect and real money by sitting in back of the Royal Motel with a gun waiting to ambush a done dealer so he could take his place dealing ounces Rodney had gone on about the hypocrisy of whites how they were dirtier in a bigger and more subtle way than any black kid trying to hustle and survive on the street but Strike always had a hard time seeing that. White-trash pipeheads and corrupt knockos right in front of him every day, he had no trouble reading them hut anybody with a tie and a briefcase had him buffaloed. ’
Strike drifted off, thinking about making it in this life, how hard it would be to draw a picture of himself that could be entitled “Making It.” He couldn’t imagine what he would be doing in that picture, what he would be holding, wearing, even what the expression on his face would be.
But his father had almost made it, or so he was told. Strike used to believe that his father’s stories about being asked to join Kool and the Gang had been beer bragging, talking trash. But a year or so after the funeral, Strike had finally asked his mother about Kool and the Gang, and his mother had said it was the God’s own truth, your daddy was asked and he really did turn it down. But just because his mother had said it was the God’s own truth didn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe his father was bullshitting her too.
Strike reluctantly scanned the parking lot again. Ambush: Who the fuck was he kidding? There were twenty, thirty people around, people hanging right over his car on the catwalk. Ambush: right. He didn’t have the heart, he didn’t have the plan. What if he just wounded Darryl, put him in the hospital. Or maybe he could tell him that Rodney wanted him dead, that he should split and save himself.
Think it through. Think it through. Strike felt himself sinking: no heart, no plan. He thought again of his mother, his promise to come back rich and legitimate, and he began working up a little rage, hating Darryl for putting him through these changes, for making himself see himself right now. Strike gripped the .25, praying that Darryl would come right up in his face and—
Whomp. It sounded as if someone had dropped a cinder block on the roof of his car from the second-story catwalk, the explosion so sudden that Strike yipped like a dog.
Whomp. A husky white guy in dungarees and a New York Jets T-shirt pounded his fist on the roof of the Accord again, then bent down, pressed his face against the driver’s side window. “Hi there.” Wiggling his fingers in greeting, he grinned at Strike with the casual proprietariness of a cop.
Strike dropped the gun between his shoes, kicked it under the seat. The cop moved off to hoist himself up on Strike’s front fender, not even looking at him, just planting himself, hunched over and smiling at the action. He whistled and rocked, enjoying the ripple he was causing in the lot: cars pulling in, hesitating, then throwing it in reverse and pulling out quick, driving back onto I-9, people coming out of their rooms and seeing him squatting like King Toad, then retreating behind shut doors.
Strike sat stone-faced, pinned in his car. He watched a chunky middle-aged Latino emerge from one of the ground-floor rooms and heard the cop whistle him over. The guy paused for a second, as if weighing options, then walked over in a bent-knee waddle. He was dressed in a white shirt, white slacks, white shoes, white Panama hat. He was high as a kite.
The cop tilted his head and beamed at the guy as if he was proud of him. “Let me ask you,” the cop said, jingling an ID bracelet on his wrist. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
The guy mumbled something with the word “student” in it.
“You want to be a student?” The cop nodded reasonably. “What do you like to eat?”
“I am working, sir.”
“Yeah? How long you working on the pipe?”
The guy hesitated. “Two days.”
“Two days? Do you know if you lie to a police officer your dick falls off?”
The guy nodded solemnly. “I don’t speak English, sir.”
“Oh yeah? Do you like spaghetti? Where’d you buy that hat?”
“I speak Spanish.”
“Spanish? Donde de yomo doo-doo.”
“Como?”
“You don’t speak Spanish. You’re full of shit.” He took the guy’s hat off his head, the guy’s hand coming up five seconds too late. The cop took out a lighter.
“You ever try to smoke a Panama hat?”
“It’s my hat.” The man in white remained flat-faced, not even daring to frown.
The cop sighed, playing with the lighter, then took the hat and screwed it down on the guy’s head all the way to his eyebrows.
“Thank you for coming to the Royal. Please don’t ever fucking come back again.” He waved the guy off.
Strike slunk down low in his seat, the cop beating a paradiddle on his fender, throwing him the same beckoning head tilt through the windshield. Strike made sure the .25 was kicked deep under the seat, then slowly emerged from the car.
“How you doing?” The cop gave him that same pleased-to-meet-you beam.
“OK.” Strike knew to keep his answers to one or two words, not give the guy a chance to goof on him. The cop wore three gold chains and a gold ID bracelet, which made Strike wonder if he was really a cop after all.
“You here for dope or pussy?” The cop looked up at the catwalk, waving, some of the people waving back.
“Neither.” Strike cleared his throat, said it stronger. “Neither.” He felt OK now, not too shaky—in fact, somehow relieved.
“So what are you here for?”
“Nothing,” Strike answered, hearing the stupidness in it.
“Nothing. You just like to drive up the rear of the Royal, sit in your car and like, what … think?”
Strike shrugged, tried not to smile.
“What do you think about? The environment? ‘Cause this is some fucking environment, let me tell you.”
“A friend…” Strike felt as if he was on TV.
“A friend. Who?”
“Donald.” He’d almost said, “I don’t know his name.”
“Donald. Donald. Yeah, well, you know what happened? Donald moved to Orlando.”
“Oh yeah?”
The cop shrugged apologetically. “Yeah, he’s down there with Mickey and Goofy so…”
“Uh-huh.” Strike started to backpedal to the car door.
