Clockers, page 56
Putting down the phone log, Rocco fought off a baffling surge of anger and tried to collect his thoughts. He had been so focused on Strike lately, so pumped to nail him, that he hadn’t thought much about Victor’s role in all this. He had no trouble believing that the kid was innocent, but he was also a liar. Rocco still wasn’t sure what was behind Victor’s surrender. He didn’t think it was a promise of cash, so it had to be either a threat from his brother that was worse than possible jail time or some demented vision of self-sacrifice. But whatever the motives, Victor Dunham had used both Rocco and the reverend as unwitting co-conspirators in the obstruction of justice, and Rocco deeply resented being played for a jerk.
For a hot minute Rocco considered dropping the entire investigation. No one in the squad was even asking about it anymore, while he could think of little else—the classic mission syndrome. But then he thought of all the goggle-eyed nights he usually spent in here, all the spacy dinners, and then thought of how much this job had brought him back to himself during the past week. He picked up the log, found the kid’s home number and reached for the phone, thinking, Victor Dunham might have used him, but to be honest, he was using the kid right back.
Rocco rode up in the elevator of 41 Dumont with a dying woman. She was thirty or thirty-five, emaciated and with glazed eyes, wearing a Bart Simpson T-shirt and hugging a carton of cigarettes. Her little daughter, beside her, stared at the boxed cake Rocco held out from his hip like a helmet. He debated with himself about whether to crack the seal and give this orphan-to-be a treat. But he didn’t think walking in on Victor’s mother with a used gift would go unnoticed. She had been both wary and incurious when he called her from the office and attempted to seduce her into letting him come by. He had promised “good news and no questions,” but she put him off, telling him she was busy and that he could just give her the news over the phone. In the end he had bluffed her out, telling her it was official business, as if she had no say about whom she admitted into her home.
When she opened the door, Victor’s mother gazed at him as if he was a bill collector. Rocco was again stunned by her buggy eyes. Struggling to recover his beefeater smile, he held out the box of chocolate cake. She ignored the gift, and Rocco was stuck standing there, waiting for her to step back so he could come in.
“Where’s the kids?” He put some disappointment into his voice, showed her the cake again. “I hope you’re not on a diet or nothing.”
Rocco was a firm believer in chocolate cake. Sponge cake, crumb cake and various pastries all had their fans and detractors, but he had never met a resident of the projects who could resist chocolate cake, and there was nothing like sitting down at someone’s table over food to get them relaxed and talking. But Victor’s mother seemed unmoved by the offering, barely glancing at it. She headed for the kitchen, leaving him standing in the middle of the living room alone.
The apartment was spotless and silent, the late afternoon sun giving the walls a glow, the air redolent with the chemical fruitiness of some kind of room spray, the only sign of disarray a big sprawl of coins on the dining room table, maybe fifty dollars’ worth of silver and pennies.
“So how’s Victor doing?” Rocco called as he went to the photo cabinet and picked up a framed studio portrait of a heavyset thirtyish man. He was dressed in soul style from the late sixties or early seventies, with a high Afro, mustache and sideburns, and a floral print shirt with long collar points lying over a solid brown vest. Rocco assumed he was Strike and Victor’s father.
He returned the photo to its niche as Victor’s mother came back into the living room with one dessert plate, one fork and one napkin, no coffee, and set them down on the small dining table. Taking a seat in front of the mountain of coins, she nodded for Rocco to sit and started sliding quarters into a red ten-dollar coin sleeve, making up change rolls for the bank.
Rocco felt like a horse’s ass, eating his own cake in this lady’s house, but he had no choice. In fact, he had to admire the move, her ability to throw him off guard with his own props.
“Tips?” He nodded to the mountain of money.
“Uh-huh.” She refused to look at him, her nimble fingers flashing, her upper body rising and falling with the effort to draw breath. She had a scooped-out look to her that Rocco hadn’t noticed before, a slight coat-hook curve from her shoulder blades to the nape of her neck.
“Where do you work?”
“Restaurant.”
Rocco sighed and put down the fork. “Look, here’s my problem. I’m the guy who took Victor’s confession. And I got everything cold except the motive. I can’t figure out why Victor would do this, why he’d throw his life away. I spoke to everybody I could about him—the reverend from First Baptist, the Hambone’s people, the people he worked for in New York, you name it. Everybody said the same thing. He’s the finest kid they ever knew, the absolute finest.”
“So what’s this good news?” She spoke to her furious fingers, asking the question quick and low as if it might earn her a blow.
“Welp, I’ve been thinking, and you know what?” He paused, trying to get her to look at him for this. “I don’t think he killed this guy. I just don’t think he did it.”
He got no reaction. Nothing, just the fingers flashing silver, that tortured look of concentration. Rocco hesitated, completely thrown. He had thought that at least she would make eye contact, if not jump right out of her seat, give it a few hallelujahs.
“And, ah, I think that the person who did kill this guy is still out there, running around free, and…” Rocco faltered, confused. “Is there anything you could tell me, any way you could help me on this?” He waited: still nothing. “I mean, tell me what you think. Because I know he didn’t do it, just like you know he didn’t do it.”
She gave him a fast, fuming shrug, then went back to the coins.
“See, my problem is, it’s easy to take credit for the solve right now, but I’m not interested in arresting the wrong man. I clear a hell of a lot of cases, and I don’t need this. What I want to do is arrest the real killer, and if I can do that, Victor is a free man. That’s the good news.”
She rose from the table, a half-dozen coin rolls standing open-ended in a tiny skyline. Rocco watched her as she walked across the room, opened a drawer and took out an inhaler. Turning her back, she took two quick pulls, hunching her shoulders each time.
“Can I ask you something?” Rocco waited for her to turn around so he could read her face. “When he called here Friday night, what did you talk about?”
“He didn’t call here Friday night.” She gave him her back again, puttering around in the open drawer.
“Well, I just happened to go over some phone records from a bar across the street from the incident, and somebody called up this house from there at about nine-thirty, talked for like a half hour, and I just assumed it was Victor.”
“Nope.” She made busy movements with her hands in the drawer as if folding a pile of napkins.
“OK,” Rocco said, reading the lie. “So who did call, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t know. I was working.”
“So who would’ve—”
“I don’t know. I was out.”
“Would ShaRon—”
“Maybe.”
She said it quickly, the word bitten off, and again Rocco knew she was lying. ShaRon hadn’t talked to Victor that night. Remembering her mute immobility during his first visit here, Rocco doubted that ShaRon and Victor talked much at all anymore. No, Victor had spent thirty-five minutes talking to this lady right here. But what the hell had they talked about? What does she know?
Rocco tried to think on his feet, recalling how Thumper described going toe-to-toe with her a year ago. Maybe she’s protecting Strike, the prodigal son, protecting him the same as Victor was protecting him.
“Did your son ever see a psychiatrist?” Rocco asked gently.
“No.” She returned to the table, to her coin work.
“Is there any reason why your son would take the blame for anybody else? Someone he was close to? Someone he felt responsible for?”
She said nothing. Exasperated, Rocco drew her a picture with giant crayons. “Maybe there was someone he let down, someone he was supposed to be a role model for, and maybe this person didn’t turn out so good, and maybe Victor felt like it was his fault that this other person turned out this way. And then by making this incredible sacrifice, he’d be giving this other kid one more chance to straighten out his life, you know?”
Rocco looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to punch in the name. Finally she met his eyes. “I know he told you that boy attacked him. I don’t see why you don’t believe him.”
Running out of guile, feeling he had nothing to lose now, Rocco decided to drop it right in her lap. “Well, look … I thought I was coming over here with some good news but, ah, do you know what the word on the street is about this?”
“I’m not about the street,” she said, fast and angry.
“Yeah, well, the word on the street is that Victor is taking the weight on this for his brother. For Ronnie.”
The woman smiled, the first smile Rocco had ever seen from her.
“Why are you smiling?”
Her voice became almost conversational. “Well, now wait a minute. I’m not gonna pretend like I don’t know what he’s doing out there, but”—she gave him a dry laugh—“Ronald has his limitations.”
“And what does he have to say about what happened? Did you talk to him?”
Her hands stopped moving, her eyes flew up, and then her words came in such a rush that Rocco imagined that someone else had just inhabited her body. “Let me tell you, about a year ago? Ronald, he started getting into that business down there. I called him out on it, he says to me, ‘But Mommy, I’m making it the only way they let a black man make it,’ and I said, I don’t wanna hear that garbage. Who do you think you’re talking to with that? Your brother ain’t doin’ that, your father didn’t do that.’ He says to me, ‘Well, that was their prerogative. Besides, Victor ain’t making it, he just working himself down, he ain’t goin’ nowhere, that ain’t making it,’ and I said, ‘Well, do you really consider selling that poison making it?’ And I remember he couldn’t even look me in the eye. He just said, ‘I just want to make enough money to get out of here, then I’m out of it ‘ and I said to him ‘Oh yeah? How much money is enough? What do you mean by enough … How long do you think Rodney Little been at it, how many years, how much money do you think Rodney Little has made, and he can’t get out of it, he never seen enough, and I bet you he always talks about getting out, always talks about enough, huh?’ See, I said that to him because I know Rodney last year got to be like a father to him because their real father died when they were little, and I should have never let him go to work in that candy store, but my boys always worked, both of them, ever since they were fifteen, sixteen. But Rodney takes advantage of these—some of these kids without fathers. Rodney gets into their heads, so I stayed on him that time because I know all that ‘I’m making it the only way a black man can make it’ nonsense that’s just Rodney inside his head, and I told him, T don’t want you living in this house if you’re out there doing that’ and he says to me ‘Mommy let me tell You something Victor’s always talking about moving out. Victor’s got six thousand dollars saved up to move it took him two years and two jobs I got me six thousand dollars in a month: I say to him ‘But someone come up to Victor ask him “What did you do for that money?” Victor says “I manage a restaurant I do security work” Victor can answer with his head high because he didn’t hurt nobody to make it ‘ Ronald says to me ‘I never forced nothing on nobody.‘I say,‘Ronald, look me in the eye and tell me what you do What’s its’ name Say it Say it out loud. What do you do? Give me its name.‘ He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t look me in the eye and he couldn’t say it. He just got up, said, ‘Mommy, next time I come into this house, I’m gonna’ be out of it. I’m gonna be flush and legitimate. I’m gonna come up and take you away from here, take all a you, and Victor’s still gonna be counting his pennies.’ And I just said to him, ‘You ain’t takin’ me no where on drug-bought money,’ and that was that.”
She paused, exhaling slowly and passing the heel of her hand under a dry eye. “That was the last time I talked to him, and I won’t even walk out that end of the projects, because I know he’s out there doin’ his business, and I don’t ever want to see that. He’s a young man and maybe he’s got to do his young man things, make his young man mistakes, and I hope one of those mistakes don’t kill him. But he’s also a young man on his own now, and I can’t take responsibility for his decisions anymore. I pray he’ll come back to himself one day, but…”
Gesturing, she accidentally backhanded a few open-ended coin rolls, spilling the money back on the table. She took in the damage and, without blinking, began to restack the pennies and dimes.
Rocco watched her, confounded: Not two words in defense of Victor, but this other little scumbag rates a whole speech.
She took another deep breath. “What I’m trying to say to you is, I know Ronald’s out there doing bad things. He knows he’s doin’ bad things, because he was brought up in this house, and that is causing him no end of pain out there. But one thing … Ronald, he might be an angry kid, he is an angry kid, but he ain’t no killer. This I would lay my life on.”
“Do you think Victor’s a killer?”
“Let me ask you something,” she said, nodding to Rocco’s sport jacket. “You carry that gun. Someone’s coming up on you in a alley or out of the dark. You go to defend yourself and you shoot that person. You.“ She pointed at Rocco. “Does that make you a killer?”
Rocco was so baffled by this woman that for a moment he stared at her as if taking her question seriously. “Can I ask you something? And I hope I’m not out of line here, but … I asked you if you talked to Ronald, to Strike, about this, and you come back at me with this, this long, heartfelt candidness, telling me all about him, how he’s a good kid in a bad head and all, defending him—well, not defending, explaining him. And I also know that last year when Victor got into that stupid shoving match with the Housing cop? I know how you went to bat for him, how you literally took your life in your hands in the street, in the police station. I mean, I know you’re a fighter, a striver, I can tell, and that thing last year came to nothing, it was a glorified shoving match, but there you were, like a tiger for your son. But that was nothing, this is homicide, and I’m the arresting officer, I’m not Thumper. This is me, and I’m coming to you. I’m saying I think your son Victor is innocent. I’m on your side…”
Rocco paused, his arms spread in bewilderment. “Mrs. Dunham, the stakes are so high. He could go to jail for thirty years on this. Where are you…”
She was staring at Rocco’s shirt, her mind miles away, and each word came out chiseled and heavy. “Victor is a beautiful, hardworking boy. He don’t lie. If he said he did it, then he did it. If he said it came about the way it came about, then that’s what happened. He told you it was self-defense…” Her eyes came up at him with a burning dryness much more terrible than tears. “Why don’t you just believe him?”
In the long silence that followed, Rocco heard the echoing steps of her grandchildren walking to the apartment from the elevator. The idea of continuing this conversation with the apartment filled with children struck him as unbearable, and Rocco rose, frowning with frustration. He dropped his calling card on the table, thanked her for the cake and her time, and left her to her stacking, her fingers flying with the intimate precision of a lifelong weaver working her loom.
Standing near Big Chief, who was studying an apartment layout for the “H” line in the O’Brien Houses, Rocco slipped on a borrowed bulletproof vest, a white one, with a drawing of a samurai across the chest. He was surprised at how light it felt. Either the vests had been improved since the last time he needed to wear one or he had gotten that much more padded himself.
“Get us the Hat,“ Thumper drawled as he stuck two light bulbs in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and jammed the flat half deep into the back of his pants. Some people would sit in the dark for six months before they’d replace a bulb, and the last thing a cop wanted to do after plowing through an apartment door was search a bedroom by flashlight.
The Fury office was in the midst of a feeding frenzy. The four Housing cops, Mazilli and two Jersey City detectives—everybody was dribbling Drake’s cakes over their vests, drinking cold coffee or flat soda, grabbing petrified slices of Swiss cheese, eating anything, Rocco the only one whose anticipation-pump blocked his appetite.
One of the Jersey City detectives flipped through a magazine from the milk crate of porn, then ran off to the John down the hall. Crunch followed after him to piss for the third time in an hour as Big Chief folded up and packed the Rabbit, a ten-pound pneumatic crowbar that could pop a door off a frame, make it fly straight back five feet before it even fell.
“Get us the Hat!“ Smurf readjusted the Velcro cinches on his vest, which was white like Rocco’s, this one adorned with a grinning skull pierced by a hypodermic needle from crown to jawbone. Rocco knew they’d all get to the heart medicine a little early tonight; that was part of the ritual anytime they had to serve paper, go through a door. So he went to the refrigerator and chugged down a pint of half-and-half to coat his stomach for the celebration to come.
It was eight o’clock, about four hours since his visit with Victor’s mother. Bugged all afternoon by the mystery of the Dunham brothers, Rocco had felt grateful for the call to action when it came through. These days, he rarely did any physical or even remotely dangerous police work, and tonight’s job seemed just the thing to cleanse his blood of too many dinners, too many drinks and not enough fear. For ten years, first as a uniform and then as an anticrime cop, Rocco got a daily jolt of adrenaline; now, he had almost forgotten what that rush was like.
