Clockers, page 17
The woman dropped to her knees, crossed her arms over her gut and, dry-eyed, bellowed, “Dar-ryl!” as if the kid was still in earshot. Mildly surprised at the grief, Rocco moved to where she was crouched and put a hand on her shoulder. He scanned the uniforms, then called over a black female officer. “Take this lady wherever she wants to go. Wash her up, stay with her. She’s sister to the body.” He gave the officer his card. “And call me at my office in about ninety minutes.”
“Yeah, well, I get off in forty-five.”
Rocco didn’t answer, just glared. Unintimidated, the woman officer called over another uniform, gave him Rocco’s card, Rocco’s instructions, and walked off.
“Fucking bitch!” The vomit-sprayed cop lurched across the parking lot, shouting, “Hoo-wah fucking bitch!“ He stopped and hunched over, trying to delicately shake out his shirt with his fingertips. Someone drawled, “Lookin’ good there, Home!” and the entire herd broke up in laughter.
Rocco looked around for the kid with the orange fade: gone. Then he turned to Touhey. “Had enough?”
7
AS TWO of the Homicides, one chunky and gray-haired, the other blond and handsome, began to carve their way back out through the crowd to the sidewalk, Strike, clutching a Yoo-Hoo, found himself unable to resist sliding right into their path, so that the gray-haired one had to gently backhand him to the side, saying “Beep-beep” as he did it. Strike horrified himself with his impulse to go right in their faces, as if begging to have his eyes read. As they plowed past him, Strike picked up a scent coming off the blond one—a piney soap smell, the smell of cleanliness, cut with a more curdled odor, one of exhaustion or desperation, like the stink of a pipehead with no money and too many hours left to his night. The cop worried him: he was like no other Strike had ever seen before, maybe some kind of expert or commissioner, somebody they brought out only for heavy investigations.
Strike had watched the cops and detectives mill around Darryl’s body and decided that most of them were just taking up space. They seemed to be playing with themselves, making wisecracks, one guy in uniform even saying to one of the sport jackets, “Mud person down,” as if a dead black man was some kind of joke. And when that pipehead woman from JFK, the one who hocked her ring to Rodney, had burst out of the crowd and knocked right into that blond Homicide before puking all over the cop in uniform, a lot of the other cops were laughing along with everybody else. The fact that no one seemed to care that much about the murder made Strike feel safe, but what did safe mean now?
Strike hung near the perimeter of the crime scene. With the body gone, along with most of the police, Strike noticed that a good part of the crowd around him had wandered off too, the only show left being Darryl’s sobbing sister. Strike was riveted by the skinny woman’s grief, but as a cop tried to bring her back to her feet, she locked eyes with Strike across the tape, recognition in her face, and a thrill of horror flashed up from his groin to his chest, sending him out of the parking lot. He walked blindly up the De Groot Street hill above Ahab’s, keeping to the shadows.
Strike tried to think about how things would be better now, but he couldn’t even remember why Darryl was supposed to get shot, couldn’t get a grip on what had gone down. He listened to his body tell him about trouble coming, felt his stomach act up even against the sweet white coolness of the Yoo-Hoo, the bottle heavy in his hand now, his kneecaps flaming from the exertion of the climb, his scattered mind periodically returning to the one truth he felt capable of comprehending: everything had changed.
Strike rested in the doorway of an abandoned tenement building high above the Ahab’s lot. He climbed the stoop and looked down on some Emergency Services cops strolling the grounds with heavy-duty flashlights, searching for bullets or something. As he watched, a little kid worked his way up the stoop. He climbed like a cub, using hands and feet, then grabbed the half-empty Yoo-Hoo at Strike’s side and took a drink.
Glancing down at the kid, Strike felt a rush of inspiration coming on, a high in his chest: buy a car seat, one of those baby seats, strap it up in the back of the Accord, make it look like a family car, maybe even throw some toys in, mess things up like kids were back there all the time. Nobody looks twice at a car with a baby seat—knockos, pipeheads, nobody. Strike clapped his hands once, laughing. Some people walking by turned to look at him, then quickly turned away.
Strike watched the kid drink. There was a snotty crust on the boy’s nose, and Strike’s stomach rippled in disgust. He looked down at the parking lot again and imagined that Darryl was still there in the doorway under that sheet, the blood blooming through the whiteness. He imagined that he heard Darryl’s sister’s shell-shocked cawing again. He shut his eyes against the vision of her puking up her misery, but the image stuck and just wouldn’t leave him. Her splattered vomit hadn’t had any chunks in it because she was on the pipe, and wasn’t putting anything in her stomach except for maybe orange juice and soda, maybe some potato chips for the salt. Strike feverishly fixated on all this, and then he felt his own stomach rise. Wheeling around toward the hallway of the abandoned building, he roared vomit, a wave of Yoo-Hoo splashing on the broken tiles.
There was a full moon out, so even without lights in the hallway Strike could see that what came up was shot through with streaks of red. He crouched over the mess, stunned, hearing again the heartbroken callings of Darryl’s sister, for real this time, coming from somewhere down the hill.
Strike’s trembling hand hovered over the thin, snaky swirls of his own blood. He tried to concentrate on exactly what he had said to Victor in that bar earlier tonight. “I’ll get back to you.” It wasn’t anything more than that. Just some empty words to ease out of the whole crazy conversation about Darryl beating up some girl, about Victor knowing some killer named My Man, both of their stories equally full of shit, or so Strike had thought. But now Darryl was dead, and Strike had no idea who did it.
Strike palmed the wetness from his mouth, thinking, Who the fuck is My Man? Where did Victor get to know anybody like that? What the fuck did Victor do?
Thinking: Everything changed.
PART II
Closed by Arrest
8
ROCCO SAT with Sean Touhey in the back of the Pavonia Tavern. The waiter, a moonlighting cop from Jersey City, stood over them, and the Fury, two hours into a shitface, sat three tables away.
Rocco had decided to allow himself one quick drink before getting back to work. They’d be going all night on Darryl Adams, plus he felt a little bad for Touhey; his last two visits had ended in some kind of trauma, so a brief decompression round seemed like the decent thing to do.
“What’s your poison, there, Sean?” Rocco asked over the horse-laughing din for the third time.
The actor blinked. “My poison?”
The guy’s putting it on a little heavy here, Rocco thought. It was just a homicide, not a thermonuclear blast. The waiter lost interest and was now watching the TV behind the bar.
Rocco tilted back in his chair. “Two vodka cranberries.” He winked at Touhey: Trust me.
Both Rocco and Touhey turned as the Fury table exploded. Thumper jumped up, knocking over his chair. “Thumpa! Thumpa!” he squawked in a honking bass sputter, doing the floppy fish, acting like a hyperventilating pipehead. “I’m rocketin’! I’m rocketin’!”
“Rocketin’!” Crunch hooted between cupped palms. ”He’p me, Thumpa!”
Touhey turned back to Rocco. “I should have coffee,” he said tentatively.
“Are you kidding me? After tonight?”
Touhey was silent for a moment, then said, “I saw it, didn’t I?”
“What’s that?” Rocco smiled in confusion.
“I looked right into his eyes.”
“Who, Adams? The kid? Yup, right in there.” Rocco felt as if he was in a play, a big haunted speech coming up. He stole a peek at Touhey’s watch, a gold, black-faced antique Hamilton electric: midnight. Rocco gave himself a half hour here, knowing that at least three other investigators would be working the job by now.
The drinks came and Touhey stared at his as if it was a test tube foaming with forbidden knowledge.
“I looked right into his eyes…” The actor held up his drink. “So what’s this,“ swirling the cubes, “compared to that?”
Rocco smiled, thinking maybe a half hour was too long.
“Where’d he go?” Touhey’s eye followed him from the side of his uptilted glass.
“The kid?”
“Where’d he go?”
“They took him to Newark.”
“Newark.” He gazed at Rocco with loopy affection, his drink half gone. “You’re amazing. Newark.”
Rocco turned red, insulted. “Well, what do you mean, where’d he go? Heaven or hell?”
“Newark. Fucking perfect.” Touhey gave him the one-eyed whale again as he drained his drink.
Rocco stared back at him, thinking, Fuck you too. Everybody in New York, all of Patty’s friends, assumed that just because he was a cop he was incapable of any but literal thoughts.
“I would kill to be you,” Touhey hissed across the table. Rocco, startled out of his irritation, downed his glass to keep pace, laughing self-consciously as he wiped his lips with a fist. “You mean, to be me all the time or in a movie?”
Touhey signaled for another round. “In a movie.”
The actor’s words were almost drowned out by another explosion from the Fury table. “It juth be power-phenalia, Big Chief,” Thumper lisped in a high frightened voice, standing again, leaning forward as if his hands were cuffed behind his back. “Tha’s awl you find here be power-phenalia, I swear it.”
The Fury, in chorus, said, “Power-phenalia!” like a toast. Crunch waved for another round even before his glass made it back down to the table.
Touhey cocked his head, fixing Rocco with a challenging squint. “Do you think I could be you?”
Rocco shrugged. “Hey.”
“Why could I be you. Why me?”
Rocco was stumped for a good answer. Why? Because he wanted him to—but could he just say that? Big Chief belched sharp enough to crack glass. Rocco was grateful for the distraction and saluted across the room. “Nice.”
Big Chief raised his drink in acknowledgment.
The actor touched his forearm. ”Why, Rocco?”
Before Rocco could respond, Touhey answered his own question, abruptly becoming Rocco, talking about the time he had first met Patty, leaning across the table, reciting the story in a way that Rocco found riveting, as if he had never heard this tale before, his own story, the actor somehow capturing in the rushes and hesitations all the mixed feelings Rocco had about his marriage, even his fatherhood. When Touhey leaned back in his chair, all Rocco could say was, “You weren’t even there.”
Rocco took a deep breath, seeing his life in the hands of this man, seeing himself vindicated and elevated on a gigantic movie screen. He suppressed a desire to call Patty, tell her this vague good news. Touhey watched Rocco’s face as if he knew just what he was thinking, and before Rocco could say anything else, Touhey reached across the table and hugged him.
“Whoa there, big fella.” Rocco gently pried himself free and Touhey laughed, still pleased with Rocco’s stunned reaction.
Both their drinks were gone again. Rocco glanced at his watch—time to go—but Touhey motioned to the waiter again, and Rocco didn’t protest.
The actor tapped the back of Rocco’s hand with a fist. “There’s only one thing. If I do this, if I do Rocco Klein, you have to be with me.”
“With you?” Rocco cocked an ear. “Like … your friend?”
“You got to keep me honest.”
“You mean like technical shit? Like an advisor?”
“Anything you want. What do you want?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Suddenly Rocco didn’t trust Touhey, became deeply wary of his impulsive, liquor-fueled buoyancy. Rocco decided not to finish his drink, a first.
“I’ll make you a producer.”
“What’s he do?”
“Anything I want.” Touhey laughed. “Can you get off next October? I want to do this next October. I figure three weeks in Dempsy, for exteriors, two months in Toronto. They’ll want to do the Dempsy stuff in Toronto too, but that’s why they’re just a bunch of suits, a bunch of sweaty fucking suits. We don’t do Dempsy, we don’t do it at all.”
“So you’re not gonna do it?” Rocco shook his head in confusion. “Hold on.”
“Hey, hey.” Touhey drained his third or fourth drink. “You know why it’s going to happen?”
“Why?”
“Because I go like this”—he wiggled five fingers—“and five people die in Oklahoma.”
“Great.” What the fuck was he talking about?
“So we’re talking October, three weeks Dempsy, then two, three months Toronto. Can you swing it?”
“October, I’m retired. I can do anything I goddamn want.” Rocco was growing angry, but he wasn’t sure if he was angry with the actor or something else, something bigger.
“Well good, you can do this.” Touhey dug a business card from inside his jacket, found a pen and haltingly recited as he wrote: “Rocco. We are happening. Bank on it. Sean Touhey.”
Handing the card to Rocco, he winked knowingly. “Being a cop, a detective, you’d probably want something in writing, something in your hand, no?”
Rocco tapped the card against the rim of his glass and managed a twisted smile. Meal ticket, he had said to Mazilli, you’re fucking with my meal ticket. Rocco felt his face go red again.
“You know what’s gonna be great about this, Rocco?”
“Hit me,” Rocco said, but his head was back into the Job, thinking, Interview the witness first. He hoped she was in his office by now, waiting for him.
“I’m directing. There’s all this mystique and hype about directors and it’s all a bunch of shit. It’s the easiest job in the world. I, I am directing this picture.” He leaned back as if waiting for Rocco to clap or throw his hat in the air.
“Great.” Rocco rose and gestured for the actor to follow. “OK there, Sean, let me earn my money.”
Rocco had to half carry Touhey into the prosecutor’s office—the actor was a delayed-reaction drunk, and the twenty minutes of unconsciousness in the car during the drive to the office had completely bombed him out.
Rocco pushed open the door with his hip. One hand was around Touhey’s waist, and the other hand gripped his arm, which was slung around Rocco’s neck. As they staggered through the brightly lit reception area, Rocco saw the witness curled up on the tattered couch next to Vy’s unoccupied desk, snoring away. Someone had pinned a note on her hip: “Do Not Disturb. Darryl Adams Horn. Witness.”
The actor began trying to walk down the hallway on his own, his shoulder sliding against the wall. “You got a drink around here?” he said.
“Coffee. That’s all we got.”
Rocco steered him into an alcove where a small refrigerator and a coffee machine lined one wall. Facing them was a holding cell that was being used as a storage room.
Anxious for Touhey to be gone, Rocco made a pot of coffee as fast as he could. “I’m gonna have somebody come in, drive you home, OK? I’ll take care of your car, get it back to you tomorrow morning.”
“I want to sleep there“ Touhey raised a limp arm toward the cell and sat on the coffee machine table, knocking over a box of sugar packets.
Rocco poured the water into the machine, laughing. “What do you think this is, Mayberry?”
“I can’t play a policeman if I don’t see him through the eyes of the policed.”
“Sean, that’s a fucking hole. The toilet doesn’t even have any water in it.”
“I approach all my people through the reverse angle. That’s my secret.”
“C’mon there, Sean…”
“The secret of my success.”
Losing patience, Rocco decided to settle for allowing Touhey to pass out again as quickly as possible. In order to make the cell at least marginally habitable, Rocco had to move out a dozen cartons filled with old homicide files, a collapsible wheelchair in which an old woman had been clubbed to death and a tagged shotgun used in a homicide-suicide two years back.
Finally Touhey lay down on the sleep rack fastened to the wall. Rocco leaned against the open bars, his stomach suddenly in knots, somehow unable to resist asking for a brief recap.
“Hey, Sean, maybe you told me this already and I was too bozo to hear it, but, ah, what’s the story of this movie again?”
“Rocco,” Touhey declared, eyes closed, hands clasped across his midsection, one shoe up on the rim of the lidless toilet, “you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not what’s the story”— he pointed blindly in Rocco’s general direction with a wavering finger—“it’s who’s the guy. We’re home free.”
Rocco walked into the main squad room, pulling a yellow legal pad and a half-full bottle of Seagram’s gin from a supply closet. He thought Seagram’s tasted like nail polish, but for some reason that’s what most of them seemed to ask for when they were getting ready to talk about what they had seen.
Balancing the gin, the yellow pad and a full cup of black coffee with four sugars, Rocco walked back down the hallway to the reception area. He put the gin and the black coffee on an end table at the head of the couch, not knowing which one the witness would go for, then rolled Vy’s chair up alongside the sleeping woman and dropped the yellow pad on his crossed knee.
For a moment Rocco sat quietly, watching her ribs rise and fall. Lying there in a tight ball, bony and frail, both knees sporting scabs, she looked to Rocco like a wizened child. She smelled more like wine than gin, but the office was all out of wine. His eyes fell to the blank pad and he began doodling, filling the top of the page with trapezoids, not really pumped up for this one, drifting off, pulling out the business card with Touhey’s declaration and for the first time reading the words on the printed side — pressure point productions — daydreaming about being an actor, imagining cops all over America watching TV, watching him play—what else?—a cop. He was slightly embarrassed by his own fantasy, reminding himself that by the end he had been talking to a walking vodka bottle. Spooking himself sober, Rocco realized he had never rung up Patty to say he wouldn’t be home until morning, but he also felt that he didn’t have it in him to pick up the phone right now. The actor had put him through so many changes that he had no idea what to say to Patty, as if a simple call home suddenly required a declaration of self.
