Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (12 page)

hung up the phone and self-consciously fingered the dime bags of heroin that were burning a hole in my pocket. There were still too many wandering eyeballs around to make a safe transfer to my desk, so I turned to my notebook.

“Notebook,” I said, using my internal voice because otherwise everyone would think I was still smoking something. “Notebook, please tell me something about Tyrone Scott.”

I flipped the pages, ever hopeful. I know it seems desperate, asking a four-by-eight-inch pad of paper to be your savior. But there are times when this kind of pleading really does work, when you’ve buried some little treasure of a note that you uncover at just the right time. Maybe it’s some scribbled observation that brings an entire picture into perfect relief. Or a name and a phone number you never followed up on. Or something you forgot having ever written that perfectly synthesizes your story.

Or you can just end up staring at a bunch of worthless scribbles for twenty minutes.
The only way I was going to discover more about Tyrone Scott was to head back out to that chicken shack and poke around.
By the time I arrived at the Wyoming Fried Chicken, home of Cowboy Kenny’s secret blend, it was pitch-black. Still, the hooded figures who patrolled the sidewalk in front of the chicken shack became aware of my pale-faced presence the moment I stepped out of my car, and scurried off quickly.
Leaving behind only one guy. My friend North Face.
“What, you drew the short straw again?” I asked.
“Aw, come on, man. I already told you everything I know. Now you going to screw up my business again?”
“You can tell your customers your product is so good I just can’t stop myself from coming back.”
“Oh, great. We’ll put it on a billboard: ‘The guy who dresses like a narc only gets his stuff from one place.’ Man, get out of here.”
“Relax. I just got one question.”
“And I’m supposed to give you the answer? Do I look like Alex Trebek to you?”
I laughed.
“I ain’t trying to be funny, Bird Man,” he said, reaching into his jacket and leaving his hand there, the all-purpose wintertime signal that a gun was being kept nice and cozy underneath.
The last time we met, North Face had just been giving me a hard time for the sake of giving me a hard time. It had been earlier in the day. I wasn’t really costing him business. This was different. It was after five now—prime time for sales. A lot of Newark drug users are slightly more functional than they are stereotypically given credit for. They manage to hold down day jobs then go straight to their local dealer and buy enough to keep them high until the following morning. The early evening was rush hour for a guy like North Face.
“Okay, okay. Take it easy,” I said. “Look, I just want to know what brand of heroin Tyrone sold and then I’ll get out of your way.”
“I ain’t in that market.”
“Can you point me toward someone who is?”
“I ain’t the Yellow Pages, either. Now get the hell out of here.”
“Do we really have to go through this again?” I asked. “You know I’m going to hang out here until I get the information I need. So why not just help me out?”
“You know what? I ain’t helping you with nothin’. I ain’t telling you nothin’. I’m gonna ask you to leave and if you don’t I’m gonna stop asking nicely.”
His hand dug a little farther into his jacket. A good 98 percent of me was certain it was an idle threat. The other 2 percent of me was sure my bowels were about to loosen.
“Look, pal, I’m just a reporter here doing a job, that’s all,” I said, trying hard to project an image of everymanness.
“Well, then, let me ask you, when my cousin got killed out here two months ago, where were you then, huh? Where was his story?”
North Face glared at me. The cold fact was, in our business, some deaths mattered more than others. But I don’t think North Face needed to hear that. When I didn’t immediately open my mouth to answer, he continued his tirade.
“Oh, so my cousin is just another dead nigga, but Tyrone Scott is some kind of cause for you people? Tyrone is better than my cousin, is that it? Because he got killed with three other people and my cousin got killed on his way to the store for some milk? That makes Tyrone better than my cousin?”
He glared some more, which I took as my invitation to speak.
“I’m sorry about your cousin,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible in an effort to deescalate the emotion of the moment.
I thought about adding more: that in a city where ninety or a hundred people are killed every year, no newspaper could write at length about every one; that we had to pick our spots or  risk being tuned out altogether; that treating every single murder like it was a big deal, while it would honor the memory of the victim, could actually make the problem of urban violence worse by lending undue attention to it.
But those were all macro justifications for a micro problem. We
should
treat every murder as if it mattered, because what could be of graver concern to society than the intentional taking of human life?
So I just said: “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
It’s tough to argue with someone who won’t put up a fight. When he saw I had no more to say, North Face relaxed his shoulders and slowly slid his hand out of his jacket, then pointed up the street.
“You can go over to Booker T,” he said. “All kinds of junkies there. Half of them used to buy from Tyrone.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get our of your hair now. And I really am sorry about your cousin.”
“No one reads the paper anyway,” he grumbled.
I let him have that parting shot. And as I pulled away, I saw the hooded figures start to emerge from their hiding places and resume their posts.

he Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project, otherwise known as Booker T, was a few blocks away. Booker T’s story was a sadly familiar one in Newark. Built not long after World War II—when it was hailed as a glistening, modern replacement for nineteenth-century tenement housing—it had once been a vibrant, thriving community where slightly down-on- their-luck families found their bootstraps and pulled themselves up.

But, in the long run, slack management, shoddy maintenance, and neglectful tenants made it just as bad as the tenements it replaced. And as the city died around it—with the middle class fleeing and the factory jobs disappearing—Booker T settled slowly into a mire from which there was no rescue. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had gotten so bad the city decided there was only one way to fix Booker T: tear it down.

But even that wasn’t easy. There were disagreements among city, state, and federal governments about who should pay for the demo lition. There were residents who didn’t want to leave. Then there were the illegal residents—the squatters, the drifters, the junkies, an entire underworld of people who hacked their way through the plywood that covered the windows and doors and used the buildings for their own shadowy purposes.

That was the Booker T I was venturing into, a place that was worse than a ghost town because the souls that haunted it were still alive. If you took a snapshot of Booker T at any one moment, you might not see anything living, besides perhaps one of the stray cats that came to hunt for rats.

But if you stayed for a while, you’d inevitably see some vagrant shuffling through. Or you might notice a tendril of smoke escaping from a window where someone had lit a fire inside a trash barrel.

Those were the people I was looking for, people who had slipped through society’s safety net, past the dozens of nonprofits and churches that may have tried to catch them, and hit rock bottom. They were, to say the least, a difficult cohort to interview. Many of them suffered from delusions and paranoias that made their grasp on the real world anywhere from tenuous to non existent. Some would be so high they might as well be mentally ill.

Still, I had to try.
I parked my car along the street that ran outside Booker T, a collection of six block-long, four-story brick buildings. In the middle was a massive courtyard, around which Booker T’s social life had rotated for fifty years.
The sense of desolation in the courtyard was overwhelming. This had once been a place where friends gathered, where stories were told, where summer days were passed, where lives were led. And now it had been surrendered to an eerie kind of urban emptiness: not the slightest bit of human activity greeted my arrival.
After maybe fifteen minutes, a lone woman wandered through, saw me, and turned in the other direction. It was no use trying to catch up to her.
Next came a man doing the junkie stumble, staggering in a chaotic pattern, unseeing and unknowing. He had a boisterous conversation going with himself, one that consisted of bits of words followed by loud, dry coughing. I considered talking to him but decided I’d be better off trying to interview one of the stray cats.
In the darkness, and with the cold numbing my senses, time became hard to judge. Had I been there thirty minutes or three hours? It didn’t matter. I would stay as long as needed until . . .
There. A man. Walking at the far end of the courtyard. The buildings were numbered, one through six, and he was in between numbers one and two. The darkness and lack of moonlight made it difficult to see what he was doing, but, yes, he had momentarily halted. Had he seen me and frozen, hoping to elude detection? Was he going to flee?
No, he was turning. He was facing Building Two. And he was . . .
Pissing on it.

waited for the man to dispense with his business, giving him the kind of time and distance I might appreciate were I urinating on a public building. Once he restored his gear, I moved in, approaching noisily so he knew I was coming. When I was still about forty feet away, I hollered out the biggest, friendliest “Hi, there!” I could summon.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” I continued, still trying to sound as harmless as I could.
I had gotten near enough to see the man was looking at me like I was his first extraterrestrial sighting. He was wearing sneakers that appeared several sizes too big and several de cades too old. I guessed he was wearing all the clothes he owned, though even with all that padding he seemed gaunt and undernourished. He had one of those patchy- bald heads, the kind older black men get when they don’t have the good sense to just shave it all off. His age, as with most advanced addicts, was difficult to guess—somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five. All you really knew for sure was that life had been hard on him.
“I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said, coming closer still.
“You sellin’ newspapers?” he slurred, even more puzzled.
I laughed. I was now close enough to see
and
smell his breath, which could have flunked a Breathalyzer from ten paces away. That was actually a good sign. In my experience, the drunks were slightly more coherent than the druggies.
“No, sir. I’m a reporter. I don’t sell the newspaper. I write it.”
“Izzat so?” the man said, smiling curiously. Thank goodness, an amiable drunk.
“Yes, sir. I’m working on a story about a drug dealer named Hundred Year.”
He recoiled.
“He dead?” the man asked. “Thas what folks been saying.”
I nodded. The man spat deliberately on the ground. “Good. I don’t like to speak no ill of the dead, but he pick on ol’ people for the hell of it. He one nasty bastard. You gonna tell people he wasn’t no good in your newspaper, yeah?”
“If that’s what’s true. That’s why I’m trying to talk to folks around here. You got any friends?”
“Oh, I got some friends. But let me ask you somethin’. You think if I help you write your newspaper, maybe you could help get me a little something to eat?”
Ah, Newark. The hustle never stops.
“That can be arranged,” I said, smiling.
“Well, then, all right. You all right.”
Having gained his approval, I decided I might as well get to the point. “I’m trying to figure out what brand of heroin he sold.”
“Couldn’t say. I don’ touch that junk,” the man said proudly. I love addicts and their logic: The guy who had been pickling his liver with alcohol for thirty years could express disdain at the thought of ever using a drug. Meanwhile the neighborhood crackhead was smugly thinking that at least she wasn’t some slurring alchy.
“You know anyone who might have bought from him?”
“ ’Round here? Shoot. Jus’ bout everyone.”
He gestured as if we were at a crowded cocktail party. I looked around at the still-empty courtyard. “Know where I could find them?”
The man thought for a moment. “S’pose I do,” he said.
“By the way, my name is Carter Ross,” I said. Normally I would have stuck out my hand for him to shake. But having been subjected to such a graphic demonstration of where his hand had just been, I kept my fingers anchored in my pocket.
“Folks call me ‘Red’, jus’ like Red Sanford, ’cept my family name is Coles,” he said. He was about 150 pounds shy of passing for Red Sanford. And he was so jaundiced, folks should have called him “Yellow Sanford.”
“I’ll follow you,” I said. “You’re my tour guide.”
“Okay, now I know a woman, she like the mayor of this place. I’m goin’ to see her now,” he said, then elbowed me in a conspiratorial fashion. “I kind of mess aroun’ with her a little bit.”
God bless the male spirit: here was a man who had no home, no job, no money, a raging case of cirrhosis and Lord knows what other maladies. But he still wanted me to know he was getting some ass now and then.
I tailed Red toward Building Five and watched as he scampered up a Dumpster, onto a fire escape, up a flight of stairs, and through a vacant spot in a plywood window. I was impressed at how smoothly he moved, given his condition. Obviously, he had been doing this for a while. With all my youth and relative health, I was struggling to keep up. When I reached the window, Red was inside gesturing for me. There was no sign of light or life.
“C’mon,” he said.
“How can you see a damn thing in there?”
“I cain’t.”
“So how do you walk?”
“Jus’ trust your feet. They know how to do it.”
I scooted through the small opening, then did my best to navigate the dark, trash-strewn room. Maybe
Red’s
feet knew. Mine were tripping over everything.
I followed Red’s voice into the hallway, where there was an array of candles casting a dim light. There were also two old mattresses and assorted flotsam and jetsam—a box of Ritz crackers, one woman’s high-heeled pump, a brass lamp that looked like it once belonged to Aladdin, bloodstained rags, and trash. Lots of trash. There was so much trash it was hard for my eyes to focus on what exactly it was. I was suddenly glad it was cold. I didn’t want to imagine what this place smelled like in summertime.
A human form was lying on one of the mattresses. “Mary,” Red said. “Hey, Mary, wake up.”
Mary rolled over, slow and drowsy. Her eyes got huge the moment she saw me.
“What you bring a cop in here for!” she shouted.
“He ain’t no cop,” Red said. “Mary, this here a reporter. He doin’ a story on that nasty sum’bitch that jus’ got hisself killed. And then he said he gonna get us something to eat.”
Red turned to me. “This here Mary Moss. Folks call her Queen Mary, ’cause she been ’round here so long she like the Queen.”
Queen Mary, Ruler of Refuse, Regent of Building Five.
“Hi, Mary, it’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner
.”
“Oh,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbow. There wasn’t much to Queen Mary, maybe a hundred pounds of loose skin and brittle bones. Her hair was a tangled, matted mess— easily one of the worst bed heads in human history.
“Did you know a drug dealer named Tyrone Scott?” I asked. “He went by the name Hundred Year.”
“Yeah, I knew him. Bastard.”
“I hear he sold a particu lar brand of heroin. Do you know what his brand was?”
Queen Mary peered at me blankly. Her face was so skeletal it made her eyeballs bulge halfway out of her head.
“You know how there’s a stamp on the bag?” I continued, making large gestures as if I were playing charades. “What did the stamp look like?”
“Oh!” she said. “Yeah, yeah! It was . . . You know . . . umm . . . Oh, damn! I just . . .”
Mary kept mumbling to herself until I remembered; I had a product sample in my pocket. I pulled it out, then picked up one of the candles so Queen Mary could see it.
“Did it look like this?” I asked.
Suddenly, from somewhere deep within the parts of her brain that still functioned, you could see about ten thousand neurons fire off at once.
“Yeah!” she said. “Yeah, that’s it! Hang on.”
She crawled off her pad and started sifting through the trash, then produced a torn dime bag, which she handed to me. Sure enough, I could see the familiar eagle with the syringe clutched in its talons. It was The Stuff.
“You mind if I keep this?” I asked.
“Depends. You really gonna buy us some food?” she asked hopefully.
“You bet.” I smiled and pocketed the empty packet.
With that, Red Coles, Queen Mary, and I collected ourselves, climbed back out the window into the night, and made our way to the corner bodega, where I bought them all the fruit juice, crackers, and cookies they could carry.
It was the best $37.12 the
Eagle-Examiner
could have spent.