No Time to Die (21 page)

His gaze veered away from me and he squinted at Alvin, Morris, and Clarence making their moves in center court. He followed the action but the veins on the side of his neck stood out like knotted cable.

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t want to know why or how you violated parole. But you did say there’s a warrant out. Clarence said you wanted to speak to someone you could trust, maybe cut a deal. What’ve you got that I can use?”

When he spoke, I listened, nodded appropriately, and remained quiet. I did not want, under any circumstance, to scare this young man away. A minute later he stopped and looked around.

“Listen, can we go someplace else? Maybe a little more private?”

I looked around also. No point in having the warrant squad swoop down before I got the full story. “Whatever you say.”

I glanced at my watch, then waved down the court at Alvin, Morris, and Clarence. “See you guys later.”

“Yo, Mali. Where you heading?” Alvin dropped the ball and came running, a frown creasing his face.

“Bob’s Restaurant,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

He looked doubtful. “You take it slow, you hear me?”

I nodded, wondering if he’d been hanging with Dad so long he’d absorbed his speeches, line by line, along with his tendency to worry.

He stared hard at Tommy as if to memorize some particular mark or mole in case I was kidnapped and he’d have to track him to Alaska or something.

“Be seein’ you, Yo-Yo.”

Tommy nodded, seeming to understand. “Everything’s cool.”

We left the park and headed downtown. He strolled beside me silently, for three blocks, carefully scrutinizing any car that slowed and any beat cop who looked our way. Tommy was young—twenty years old at most—and not as tall as I. He was muscular and walked on the tips of his sneakers, bouncing forward like a boxer in training. His T-shirt read “Million Man March” and I wondered if he had attended.

At the door of a small restaurant that I thought was private enough, he hesitated.

“What if you can’t use what I got to say? What if …?”

I touched his shoulder and opened the door. “What I’ve heard so far is very interesting. I want to hear the rest.”

Bob’s Restaurant, just off Seventh Avenue and 122nd Street, was so small that almost everyone agreed it was better to take out a dinner than eat at one of the four postage-sized booths that crowded the place. But the food was so good the crowd never stopped coming.

Despite the afternoon heat, the dim lighting and the exotic ferns that decorated the window made the place seem cool inside. The overhead fan rotated the air rising from the kitchen and sent it back down again, not cool but rich with the aroma of simmering oxtails, baked chicken, cheese baked macaroni, collard greens, cabbage sautéed in garlic butter, and candied yams.

Behind the narrow counter, Bob, an implausibly slim, middle-aged man who was the cook, waiter, and owner, moved back and forth among the pots and pans. A sign above the narrow counter read:

“Be with y’all in a minute,” he said. “Grab a seat.” He waved toward the one available booth and I watched his toque disappear among the forest of overhanging copper-bottomed pans in the kitchen.

We sat in a high-back booth facing the kitchen. It was situated away from the window and Tommy preferred to sit facing the door. Bob had turned on the radio and WBGO jazz masked the nearby conversation, but Tommy still kept his voice low as he leaned forward and folded his arms on the Formica table.

“I didn’t get jammed on nuthin’ real bad. Not like no gun charge or nuthin’, you know. Just dumb shit. Cursed out my P.O. down at his office and didn’t show up again when I was supposed to. I don’t know why I did that. I mean, the brother was okay. He was cool, you know. Didn’t treat me like some a them white cowboys, come bustin’ in your door with they hand on they gun, one foot on the floor and the other ready to go up your ass. With the brother, it was always Mr. Walker this and Mr. Walker that. Respect, you know what I’m sayin’?

“But I was dealin’ with some heavy personal pressure at the time. My aunt was on my case, wantin’ me to get a gig, ’cause you know every parolee supposed to have a job. But how you supposed to get one if you ain’t trained to do nuthin’? Well anyway, I know it’s too late for excuses. I fucked up and hard time is starin’ me in the face.”

“Not necessarily …”

When Bob in his waiter’s role came to the table, Tommy was nervous and settled for iced tea, no sugar. I examined the menu, skipped the heavy stuff, and went for the peach cobbler with two scoops of butter pecan ice cream and whipped-cream topping. Enough to hold me through this meeting.

We remained silent until Bob moved back away, then I said, “Sounds like you’re having a tough time, no job and all …”

He eased his hands across the table, peeled off a napkin from the dispenser, and twisted it around his fingers as he spoke.

“… okay, here’s what I got. I was on my roof one night about three weeks ago. Too damn hot. Room felt like a oven. I know I got curfew but least I wasn’t hangin’ at the corner. Technically I was home, you know what I’m sayin’? Technically. And I was on the roof—”

“Alone?” I asked, even though he’d said so earlier.

“Aah, yeah. Solo.”

“What were you doing?”

“Well, I—”

He hesitated again and I saw the sweat stand out on his clean-shaven head, form a thin rivulet, and arc at his thick eyebrows. He had high North Carolina Cherokee cheekbones and deep-set eyes that telegraphed his fear of returning to prison. As tough as he seemed, he was also quite handsome, and returning to prison meant having to fight not only for his manhood but possibly for his life.

He had been living with his aunt on the top floor of a five-story walkup on Powell Boulevard since his release six months ago and needed to talk someplace away from home because his aunt would evict him if she found out he’d messed up again.

“Look,” I said, “forget about what you were doing. What did you see?”

I reached into the dispenser and handed him another napkin and waited as he wiped his face.

“Well, I ain’t too sure what I seen. I mean it was dark and all, you know. Midnight, I think.”

He glanced at me and added, “Or maybe it was a little earlier, I ain’t too sure. Anyway, I’m there and the dude come up on me swift, you know. I thought it was the Five-O at first and I, like, froze. Homeboy so swift he didn’t even see me. But I saw him though. Got a deep peep. He was wide-eyed, grinnin’ like a fuckin’ Halloween pumpkin. Eyes all wide and shit. Like he was high on somethin’. And he was talkin’ to himself, mumblin’ …”

“What was he saying?” I asked, looking up from a napkin I’d started to scribble on.

Tommy shrugged and spread his hands out on the table. His fingers were long and thin, but I noticed the slight tremor.

“I couldn’t catch it ’cause he was mumblin’, crazy like, and he was walkin’ funny. Wide-legged. Like he had just …” He glanced at me again and hesitated, then decided that, having been on the force, I’d probably heard it all before.

“He, ah, look like he had just come on himself,” he whispered, avoiding my gaze. “And his underwear mighta been sticky or somethin’. I don’t know. Homie was too strange is all I can say.”

He wiped the bridge of his nose again, closed his eyes, and pressed the napkin to his forehead.

“What did he look like?”

“Lessee. Dark skin. Average build. Real big arms. ’Bout my height, I guess, but I can’t be too sure ’cause I was on the—you know, that curve of the roof that slants up to the edge? Well, like soon as I heard the roof door bang open, I rolled right into the curve. Hell, wasn’t no place to run. If it was the Five-O, I wasn’t takin’ no bullet in the back just so some blueshirt could git a promotion on me. Uhn-uhn. I laid right in the cut,
figurin’ they’d take a pass. When I ain’t seen no flashlight pop, I knew it wasn’t the real thing, but I laid anyway, and watched this crazy motherfucka and wondered what was gonna go down next. Come to think of it, I could even smell ’im. Boy funkier than government cheese.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Some kinda dark pants. Maybe the kind you go joggin’ in, I think. Sneakers. Dark T-shirt with some writin’ on the back but I ain’t too sure about that neither. I mean I couldn’t read it bein’ that it was dark. And I can’t tell you what his face look like normal ’cause, like I said, it was all twisted up and he had a grin you ain’t gonna see ’cept maybe on fright night. I wanna know what kinda bomb shit he was on, man.”

He glanced at me again and added quickly, “So I could stay away from it, you know what I mean. He scared me so bad, like if I
hadda
been high, I woulda crashed in a flash.”

“Was he carrying anything?”

“Come to think of it, some kinda package, small. Fit under his arm. Couldna been nothin’ heavy ’cause it didn’t slow ’im down none. Also, his hands looked white, shiny …”

I folded the napkin. Tommy pushed the glass, empty now except for the ice, to the middle of the table and looked at me expectantly. “I live in the same building where that lady was murdered. The same building, you know what I’m sayin’ …”

I sat in the silence watching the faint trace of ice cream melt over the crumbs of my peach cobbler and watching Tommy twist the paper napkin to shreds.

Tommy lived in the same building Marie had lived in. There had been cornflakes scattered on her body but
no box had been recovered. The killer had taken it. And there were no prints anywhere on the scene.

“I want you to speak to someone,” I whispered. “A Detective Honeywell. He should be able to work something out with your P.O.”

The temperature was hovering near ninety when I left the restaurant and the pavement radiated enough heat to penetrate the soles of my sneakers. Powell Boulevard at 3:00
P
.
M
. was practically deserted except for the speeding traffic and a few somnolent pedestrians who seemed too dazed to figure out that they shouldn’t be outdoors in the first place, except in an emergency.

The minute I stepped in the house, I turned the air up full-force and ran a bath of lukewarm water scented with hibiscus. A half hour later my head was clear enough to again pore over my notebook and transfer the notes from my conversation with Yo-Yo. I settled in the chair by the window with a pitcher of iced tea and read the earlier entries. I had drawn a diagram—two overlapping circles which I’d labeled “Bronx” and “Harlem.” Three lines, like wheel spokes, radiated from each circle and held the names of the women. In the small space common to both circles, I had scribbled the word “cornflakes.”

Below the circles were lines of description.

The Bronx women, according to Tad’s Four-Eight
source, were single, lived alone, and had no children. All had well-paying jobs or professions, yet nothing had been stolen from the apartments. One of the Bronx women, a young Latina, had worked as a bank loan officer; the second, a thirty-year-old African American, had been a general office manager for a fashion house; and the third, an African American, about thirty-eight, had been a supervising service representative for a cable television company.

Below the “Harlem” circle, I noted that Claudine had been a teacher, Marie a postal clerk, and Felicia an artist.

I kept going back to the space where the circles overlapped, and what Yo-Yo had said: “some kinda package, small. Fit under his arm. Couldna been nothin’ heavy ’cause it didn’t slow ’im down none. Also, his hands looked white, shiny …”

What was the man carrying? An empty box? Was he wearing gloves, latex gloves, white and shiny?

I scanned my earlier notes: the likely places he could have watched the women, studied them until he had their routine together. Like jazz clubs, restaurants, gyms, post offices, banks, museums, galleries, schools. I crossed these out and folded my arms on the windowsill, listening to the murmur of the songbirds outside. They sounded muted, as if they were being parboiled by the rolling power of the sun.

I finished the iced tea, got dressed again, and left the cool comfort of the house. By the time I strolled the few blocks to Bertha’s beauty salon, the temperature had taken its toll again and I was glad to see the inside of her shop despite the high-decibel soap opera blasting from the television.