Clockers (8 page)

Rocco had had a few brushes with celebrity himself—if you could call a dozen or so mentions in the
Dempsy Advocate
for various homicide arrests celebrity—and once about three years ago when he was still living alone in Dempsy, a local journalist had come to his apartment to interview him for an article, “The Manhunters.” After two hours of talking, they had finished up with a fast fuck in the living room, and Rocco had been pretty pleased and excited by that. But afterwards, when she was putting her clothes back on, the journalist had burst into tears and said, “Why do I always do this to myself?” and he had wound up alone, sitting on his couch in his underwear, staring at the wall.

In those days he was working the midnight tour, and he had fallen into the habit of wearing a sleep mask. He couldn’t drop off without one, in fact, but after the journalist had left he had envisioned dying alone in his sleep, pictured the local cops, all of whom he knew, coming upon his body in boxer shorts and the mask. It would be the most humiliating scene imaginable, like coming upon an auto-erotic asphyxiation or something, and two weeks later, after having forced his way into a house, responding to a report of a woman possibly murdering a child, he had met Patty and decided for the first time in his life that it was time to fall in love.

“It’s like three o’clock, Patty.” Rocco eyed his .38, which now lay behind a box of maxipads on the top shelf of her open shoe closet.

“I know,” she mumbled, not taking her eyes from her reading, something about myths and origins.

In the beginning—not now. thank God—Patty was always sharing the important books of her life with him, like
Black Elk Speaks, The Golden Bough
and
Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The books always vaguely hippie-ish to him. although “hippie” was a word from
his
life, not hers, since she had been Erin’s age when Woodstock went down.

“It’s like three-oh-five, in fact.”

“What—you’re going to tell me the time every minute?”

“Hey, fine, I’m just saying, whatever, but…” He tilted his head to the door, to Erin.

“I’ll get up with her. Don’t worry, OK? I do it all the time.”

“You’re gonna walk around all day on four hours?”

“I do it all the time.”

“No problem then.” Feeling sulky, Rocco thought about marriage, how it should be an island of comfort. He liked that, an island of comfort. Rocco wondered what his marriage would be like in six months when he planned to retire. He had no idea what the future would hold for him except that he would be going out at half pay, about twenty thousand dollars a year. But Patty had a trust fund that reduced his full salary to mad money, so maybe he could just live off her, be a dapper drunk private investigator like the Thin Man. The Fat Man.

“I’m gonna grab something,” he said. “You want tea or anything?”

“No thanks.” Patty gave him a quick look, as if she knew what snack he had in mind but didn’t want to take him on at this hour. Still, her silence didn’t make him feel any less accused.

Rocco got up, took another Pledge and then stood over Erin again. If he died at sixty, Patty would only be a hot forty, the baby a teenager. He had to stop drinking, get back into fighting trim.

Erin looked up, but not at him. She made a clicking noise with her tongue, over and over.

Rocco reached in, picked her up, held her high against his chest. The baby was wide awake, calm, but far away. Here I am, Rocco thought, I’m picking her up in the middle of the night, a good father.

He carried Erin over to one of the big kitchen windows and began counting irons in the fire: going in on Mazilli’s liquor store, employment and security polygraphs, private investigator. But tonight those prospects all seemed like bullshit, the usual cliches, no hedge against oblivion in any of them. At times like this, with his days on the streets coming to an end, his nights behind a Homicide desk flat and without edge, Rocco often felt as if he was standing in an airport surrounded by his luggage and holding a blank ticket.

Rocco stood cheek-to-cheek with his baby and looked down at the city.

“Say, ‘Good night, taxis.’”

“Good night, taxis.” Her voice was dutiful.

“Good night, bridges.”

“Good night, bridges.”

“Good night, crackheads.”

“Good night, crackheads.”

“Good night, werewolves.”

“Good night, werewolves,” Erin chanted, imitating his voice, beat for beat. Then, raising her eyes, she pointed up and said in an eerily precise singsong, “There’s the moo-on.”

“Yeah, baby … there’s the moon.”

Rocco imagined looking back from his deathbed and remembering this moment of holding her, validating the moon in the middle of the night, being calm, tender and strong: a good father.

3

”
DO YOU
know that more young mens get killed on Thursday nights than any other time of the week?” Rodney drove with a long Vienna Finger sticking out of his mouth. “This
cop
told me that.”

“Yeah, huh?” Strike watched the cookie shrink under Rodney’s mustache.

“Yeah, ‘cause it’s like the longest time away from the last paycheck, so everybody’s all strung out and it’s kind of like the beginning of the
week
end, so…”

“Huh.” Strike wasn’t really listening. He sat in the shotgun seat with ten dollars on his hip and twenty-odd thousand on his lap, the Toys R Us shopping bag like a lump of radiation as Rodney rolled through the red lights as if they were stop signs.

“So you got Futon running it again?”

“Yeah well, he’s the least worst.”

Rodney had left the Cadillac in front of the candy store and taken his van, a hollow rusty hulk with two naked S-frame seats in front, nothing in back except a few loose orange soda cans rolling around on the carpetless floor, the lazy rattling driving Strike crazy.

Strike thought cash and dope exchanges were Erroll Barnes’s department. He had wondered and worried about it nonstop since the night before, but now he didn’t want to bring it up, preferring to be in the dark than be told to stop and sniff the motherfuckin’ roses again. He assumed they were headed over to the O’Brien projects, where Champ held court. Rodney was Champ’s lieutenant like Strike was Rodney’s lieutenant, and Champ controlled the bottles in Dempsy, buying three kilos a week from New York, stepping on it to make six and distributing the six kis to Rodney and five other lieutenants. The kis cost Champ eighteen grand each for the three, but he sold the stepped-on six for twenty-five grand each to his lieutenants, making a profit of a hundred thousand dollars a week for a few hours’ work. Champ had it knocked—no fuss, no muss no sweating out a million ten-dollar bottle transactions Champ even had four baby Rottweilers each one named after a cop in the Fury That’s why he was Champ. Strike just hoped that when they got to O’Brien Rodney would leave him in the car because he didn’t want to know where Champ’s dope apartment was. He could live without that information.

Two blocks into JFK Boulevard Rodney got waved over by a pipehead with two shopping bags. Rodney pulled over and peered down, his chin on his arm, the pipehead shiny-eyed, stinking, holding a taped-up box for Rodney’s consideration.

“A waterator.” His voice dropped to the lockjaw bass growl that came from hitting the pipe.

Rodney stared at the picture of the water-purifying siphon on the box, clucked his tongue, reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat wad, lots of hundreds. He counted out ten singles, then tossed the box in the back of the van. The basehead mumbled something in the neighborhood of thanks and loped away.

Rodney drove on, saluting his street crews on the boulevard like a general, the clockers dancing in place, absently swinging their arms, smacking fists into open palms, yelling out his name, every once in a while dashing up to the van to ask him something, including one of his other lieutenants, who told Rodney to stop daydreaming and answer his damn beeper, they were down to next to nothing.

Strike didn’t really know these clockers. They worked the boulevard, lived on the side streets and didn’t do nearly as much business as the clockers in the projects—but they also didn’t get hassled by the Fury, which only worked public housing. It cost Rodney four to five thousand a week in envelopes to keep the flow going out here. Strike knew that Rodney had worked out something with enough police in various squads and shifts so that as long as the JFK crews were discreet, no one would bust them. But the Fury wouldn’t take a dime. Not that they did much more than harass when it came down to it—any night they grabbed as much as two clips was a good night for them. But they were still a pain.

A girl moved along the sidewalk in a mincing half jog, pacing the van, waving for Rodney to stop. The dragging of her high-heeled sandals on the pavement sounded like someone shoveling snow. She was dressed in a red bolero jacket with padded shoulders and a brocade pillbox hat, but Strike saw that she had that sickening gloopy smile of some bitch that’ll do anything for a bottle.

Rodney pulled over, and she started in by making small talk and flirting. Then she got down to it.

“Rodney, I got to get this nice sweater I want. This girl sewed it for me, but she says she wants her money tonight.”

Rodney, heavy-eyed, grunted, “Uh-huh.” The girl worked a gold ring off her finger, its diamond chip a pinhole of light.

“She wants twenty dollar, so you hold this here.” She gave him the ring, pointing out the diamond. “You know me, you know it’s real, see that? I’ll come back get it from you
tomorrow
night, OK?”

Rodney exhaled through his nose, dug out a twenty, held it out between his fingertips, then snatched it away at the last second. “You don’t come back with my twenty tomorrow night, don’t bother coming back at all, now. The ring be mine then, you understand?”

The girl looked at her ring, hesitating. “What if you hold it till Saturday? I’ll get you the twenty back Saturday.”

Rodney shook his head and gave her back the ring, the twenty vanishing into his fist. She didn’t like that at all, chattering “OK, OK, OK,” and coaxing the crumpled twenty out of his hand. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Rodney drove away from her, studying the ring for a half block, then stuffing it into his pocket.

He made three more stops, once to buy two factory-wrapped horror videotapes from another pipehead with a shopping bag, ten bucks, once to take a leak against the side of a building, some other girl coming up to him as he was pissing, saying, “Can I talk to you private?” and finally pulling up on a side street in front of a shabby and dark wood-frame house, getting out on the sidewalk and whistling as if for a dog. A scruffed-up pipehead with a ragged beard and a dirty plaid shirt came out of the house onto the porch, a shard of wood sticking out the side of his hair like a chopstick.

“What’s up?” Rodney rocked on his heels.

“I almos’ finish, man. I tol’ you I get it done tonight, right? I got almos’ all the downstairs all cleaned up,
boxed
shit,
bagged
shit. You want to see?”

Rodney shook his head. “You don’t leave till you finish, right?”

Seeing no light on inside, Strike wondered how this guy cleaned up in the dark.

Then he saw Rodney take a rubber-band-bound clip often purple-stoppered bottles out of his pocket, pluck out five and pass them up to the raggedy guy on the porch. The guy bowed his head and retreated into the house with his bottles. Watching Rodney pass out the dope on the street as if they were cigarettes made Strike sink into his seat with panic: Rodney might as well wear a damn “Bust Me” sign while he was at it.

Rodney climbed back into the van, pissing and moaning about the house. “I can get five, six families in there we get it fixed up right, you know? But I can’t get a goddamn home improvement loan. ‘Cause I do it up front with cash, the IRS is gonna say, Whoa, how you pay for this? Then it’s theirs, you know?”

Strike was silent, shaking his head, thinking of the other five bottles still riding in Rodney’s pocket.

“You got to have houses,” Rodney said as he pulled into the road. “I tell you niggers that all the time. This shit’s gonna be over someday. Put it in houses, you can get off the street and still make some serious bread. ‘Cause I’m getting too old for this shit and I got to make my break, you know? I got me the candy store, the crap house, and I got me four properties now like for rentals. Soon’s I get the motherfuckin’ improvement loans, I’m off the
street,
I’m in
houses.
“ He nodded, tight-lipped. “Give me houses, bawh…”

Strike didn’t want to hear it: “What the fuck’s
wrong
with you, man, paying that nigger in
bottles,
drivin’ aroun’ with
bottles.
Let me know up front about that, OK?” Strike rubbed his gut, his face swelling with agitation. “I mean god
damn,
Rodney … I mean Jesus Christ.”

Rodney smiled. “I say to the nigger, I give you fifty dollars clean out the ground floor. So it’s like this, do I give him five ten-dollar bottles cost me a dollar fifty each? Or do I give him fifty dollars cold cash? What do I do?”

“What you
do,
“ Strike said, “is You don’t take a chance on getting caught holding. You pay the nigger his fifty dollars so
this
motherfucker”—he stabbed a finger at the Toys R Us bag—“don’t wind up in a goddamn police locker and
this
motherfucker”—he grabbed his own crotch—“don’t wind up in no county bullpen. Goddamn, how you get to be
you
anyhow?”

Rodney was still smiling, off somewhere. “I tell you what happened last week? I got pulled over by this new knocko team. You know that new flyin’ squad they got? They got me with a clip. I’m thinking, I don’t even
know
these motherfuckers, ho shit, what do I do now, ‘cause I got so much violence on my goddamn jacket, they pull me in even with this itty bitty clip, I’m going away three years if a
day,
an’ like this flyin’ squad supposed to be the goddamn Texas Rangers or the Green Berets, you know? I don’t even know what to say, they got me hands up on the car, this little old pink-eyed Santa Claus-looking motherfucker patting me up my legs. He gets up around my chest, you know like
holding
me from behind? Starts whisperin’ in my ear, ‘I want
3.
Cadillac’ Just like that.” Rodney drove on, smiling. “‘I want a Cadillac’”