A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (6 page)

“This asshole
won’t
get the benefit of doubt from me. He hears and he understands and
he speaks English.
Let me walk him into a
side room,” the uniformed cop standing over me said. He wanted a reaction. Seemed to think I was supposed to start blabbering because he threatened to take me to the side room.

That’s all they could do
, I thought to myself. I had emptied my pockets of a slim stack of hundreds, a thick pile of twenties, and of all of my personal belongings. I also handed my gym bag, my cash, and identification to my second wife and told her to bury it in a place that only she knew, and where it could not be found. When she and I parted, I purposely had only my nine, three twenty-dollar bills, and one clean white washcloth on me.

“Address?” the obese typing cop asked me. Getting no response, he leaned back in his chair. “I’ll give you one more chance before I hand you over for your private meeting, in a side room,” he threatened. “Address?” he repeated. “Date of birth?” He switched his question. Completely frustrated, even though he had just got started, he pushed himself backwards and away from his desk, the chair wheels squeaking like they were alive and crying for mercy beneath his heavy weight. “Goddamn it, throw him in the holding cell till he talks,” the fat-fingered cop concluded while blowing out a blast of hot air and rising up slowly, then wobbling away.

The cop left standing over me leaned in close to my ear. His breath was the odor of shit and his spit splashed out his venom.

“That guy right there is a good cop,” he said, referring to the fat one. “The kind who gives knuckleheads like you a second chance. He cares whether you’re a juvenile or not. That’s why he wants your date of birth, for your own good. He even takes care of his kids. Why don’t you cooperate with him? Tell him when that bitch you call momma dropped a fatherless son of a bitch like you out of her filthy fucking hole.”

The fat cop looked back at the angry officer from across the room as though he wanted to know what the other had said to me. Then he disappeared.

“It’s against the law to be outside without identification,” the
shit-breath cop said, now looking down on me. “And that’s not the only charge you’re facing . . . There’s failure to stop and obey an officer’s command, resisting arrest, fleeing from a crime scene . . .”

Then I knew. To hold me, they would grab at any charge. They would lie and make things up, and they did. I did not resist arrest. I did not defend myself. I had been silent and still. To me, that meant they were desperate and had not found the murder weapon yet, or an eyewitness to the murder, or any solid evidence. Instead, they needed me to incriminate myself, to make the major charges stick.

“Get up,” the officer ordered. I stood.

*  *  *

Behind bars but no longer cuffed. It was crowded in their holding cell, dudes hugging the bench the same way they do on the block. Cool, I walked to the far right corner and squatted, my back against the wall, one of my usual thinking positions.

“What size you wear?” some nigga standing and staring at my Nike Jordans asked me. I stood up like I was about to cooperate. Halfway to standing with my back still against the wall, I kicked him and he flew backwards into the next man. He leapt up and now they were both glaring. I gave ’em the deadpan stare. Let’s face it: we each knew we were all empty pockets and not holding. Hand-to-hand they would have no wins against me. Besides, I knew they didn’t want none. I could see it in their eyes. They did what punks do. They backed down and went back to their nonsense. One of ’em picked a new vic; maybe that guy would believe him. I didn’t.

Squatting again with my eyes wide open, I was traveling into my mind, setting and cleaning it up. First I had to empty out the anger and the fury and the rage. It was much less than before the murder no doubt, but even the amount remaining was a red fog that blocked me from precise, clear, and new thoughts. I was quietly inhaling and exhaling, shaking it off, lowering my blood pressure. At the same time, I was attempting to discipline my eyes not
to keep checking the clock that was lodged into the wall outside the cell.

“While in captivity,” my sensei had taught me in one of my many private ninjutsu lessons, “never obsess over time. It is a form of self-torture. Use your memories of the past. Relive them in your mind. Stretch each memory out, even the ones that only lasted a few minutes in real life, and relive each of those memories for days at a time. A man with no memories of happiness and pleasure, or family, friendship, and adventure, will be conquered by imprisonment, conquered by time, and conquered by his captors.”

Faces and bodies in the holding cell kept changing. Some were released, others transferred to hospitals or central booking or wherever.

In the stench of blood, shit, and piss, my aim was to calm myself completely. I had considered whether this was a physical battle or a mental one. I concluded that it was both. It had to be physical, because I am confined. It had to be physical, because I had been nightsticked and dragged and electrocuted by the cops.

A mental battle, I had learned young, was tougher than a physical one. As I surveyed my surroundings, I was swiftly realizing that my mind, which was accustomed to being challenged, to learning and hearing various languages and actively solving problems and handling and conducting business and seeking out new and exciting things, was now imprisoned in a small and dirty place with small-minded, stupid, crazy, and backward men who could neither learn anything nor teach anything or even communicate effectively to one another in their own English language. Their vocabulary was limited to mumblings, curses, insults, screams, and corruption, and there was no light to be had from any of them, the police or the captured. I told myself that my mental battle would be to keep my mind strong, while being surrounded by the weak. I had to keep learning and growing day-to-day without any teachers or true examples. I had to remain active and increasing in knowledge. Moreover, I had to maneuver and outthink the cops. Even though I had
considered owning up to the murder, I knew it mattered what I revealed and what I concealed, how much evidence I allowed them to collect and confirm. Yeah, I slaughtered the sucker, but the details of how that happened would determine how much time I would have to serve. The less time the better. Especially because I merked a joker who was a lesser man.

I know these Americans believe that “all men are created equal.” I don’t. I believe all men are created,
period.
And each man makes choices and takes action one way or another. What a man chooses to do or not to do is the only way to measure his worth. A man who chooses to love is not equal to a man who chooses not to love. A man who builds is not equal to a man who destroys. A man who protects is not equal to a man who offends and assaults women, children, and defenseless people. A man who thinks and solves problems is not equal to a thoughtless man who makes mischief and problems and who is himself a problem. Nah, not equal at all. How could a lazy man of excuses be equal to a hardworking man? How could an undisciplined man be equal to a man who is disciplined, who is straight, who resists temptation, addiction, and gluttony? He can’t be equal. Those are my thoughts, my beliefs and my answer, and I’m one hundred percent certain.
So now that the lesser man is deceased
, I thought to myself,
I gotta accept my punishment for doing the murder deed, but that punishment should be equal to the worth of the man I slaughtered.
The more worthless he was, the less time I should serve. That’s justice to me.

“You, let’s go,” a cop suddenly called me out. “Put your hands between the bars.” He cuffed me and then opened the gate to let me out.

Escorted into a small room with a table, four chairs, and a video camera mounted on a tripod, I checked there was nothing but one blackened glass window, one same door to enter and exit, and no pictures or artwork or certificates or degrees displayed on the walls. There was a clock, though, embedded in the wall, large and
circular and impossible not to notice or watch. Matter of fact, the precinct had clocks everywhere.
For the cops, time is money
, I thought to myself, recalling the rookie officer who was amped to be making overtime pay while dealing with my arrest and questioning in the dead of night. They love the clocks, ’cause with every tick-tock they was earning and no one else is making money while they’re in here except them. To the prisoner the clock is a slow poisoning, a device that confirms a man’s loss of control over himself, loss of control over his time. My sensei was correct. Staring at the clock just confirms the distance between a prisoner and his family and loved ones. Concentrating on that was a useless losing strategy.

New faces, one uniformed and two plainclothes cops, came in calculating, with their coffee cups in their hands. One of them threw a brown bag onto the table. The other cop opened it and pulled out a burger; I could tell from the smell. It was wrapped in white greasy paper and accompanied by a red-and-white paper dish filled with fries and a can of grape soda.

“Sit down,” the uniformed cop ordered me. I sat. “We get that you ain’t the talkative type. We got that you ain’t got no name, because you’re a nobody. We agree.
You are nobody.
We don’t even want you here. But there’s only one way out. Give us the name and location of your bosses. If you don’t want to talk, just write it down.”

He pulled out a small pad of paper and a half pencil with no eraser, laid them down on the table, then pushed them over to my side. I didn’t reach for them, didn’t move. We sat in silence. I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about anyway. My bosses?

“Holy shit, it’s four a.m.,” the uniformed cop said with intensity. “We can transfer you out to a place where no matter how sleepy you get, you’ll be afraid to shut your eyes for fear of some nut crawling into your little dookey-hole.” I didn’t react. I didn’t say anything or move one muscle in my face or body.

“Your silence is assuring us that you are guilty. You did something criminal and you know it,” one plainclothes cop said. “There
is a bunch of shit that we can pin on you. A busy Friday night in Brooklyn, a perp won’t talk, got no name, no address, no identification, six dollars, no alibi, no defense. We could match you up with anything, from pickpocketing to murder one. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We want the truth, the name of the players. If I was you I’d start talking real fast and real soon,” plainclothes number one said.

“I’ll handle this,” plainclothes number two said to number one. “You must be hungry,” he said to me, pushing the burger towards me and moving the grape soda within my reach. Inside I was laughing. These were the type of cops my man Ameer had told me about, who would come around the high school asking students to participate in the police lineup in exchange for a lemonade and a baloney sandwich. Like a police lineup was some type of legitimate after-school job and the police were friendly neighborhood employers.

“So what’d you do?” I had asked Ameer.

“You know I had to fatten up the reward. Them other cats went for the free lunch. I talked ’em up to sixty bucks for each of my appearances.”

“What if you would’ve got picked as the face that fit the crime?” I asked.

“Nah, the cop told all of us if you’re not guilty, you got nothing to worry about and something to gain. Besides that, it’s impossible. Ain’t
nobody
got a handsome face like mine,” Ameer joked.

Now this Brooklyn detective who must have thought he was better than the blue boys ’cause he got to wear his own cheap clothes to work was trying to buy me with a beef burger. Guess they thought the same shit worked on every man the same way. It didn’t.

Mystery novels I have enjoyed reading taught me more than a few things about the American law. These cops had forty-eight hours to book me on charges and stand me before a judge. All of the charges they had mentioned so far were bullshit, although they were good enough for them to use falsely to book me. However,
even they wanted more. I wanted them to hurry up and charge me and move me and get it over with. Still, I wasn’t going to help them to do it.

“Not going to eat—we’ll see how long that’s going to last. Take one bite of this burger and you better be ready to give me something: names, bodies, drugs, weapons.” He left. The others followed him out.

The door clicked closed when the last one exited. So what I was cuffed and locked in a side room. I wasn’t sweating his burger or fries.
I had already eaten after the murder and right before my arrest. The thought of my last meal threw my mind into rewind. I was alone, just me and my memories, and that was cool with me.

4. THE RED BAG 
•
 
A Reflection

I had already eaten well in the few hours between the murder and my arrest. I had been crouched on the curb between two parallel-parked cars, a cream-colored Comet and a Ford pickup truck. I had two bags of purchases from the dollar store on the corner, in a Brooklyn neighborhood where I did not live, but where my family business had a few customers and where I had delivered clothing that Umma made for them. I was setting up to write Umma a letter, a task that had to be done with truth, intensity, and skill.

Seated in the middle of a darkened street underneath the radiant light pouring from a sign on a row of stores, it was the perfect spot for me to complete my second and final task of the night. Curbside, the vehicles shielded me from the view of the foot cop posted across the street on the corner, to my right. The pickup truck shielded me from the parked cop cruiser on the same side where I was seated but at the opposite corner from the foot cop, to my left. Behind me, a mailbox shielded me from the view of people walking by. As my second wife would say, “a strategic position.”

Knowing that any of these vehicle owners could walk up at any moment to start their cars, drive off, and expose me to view didn’t matter. There was no reason that any of these cops on this block in this neighborhood should be looking for me, other than the fact that police stay looking for young black males for the sport of their hunt.