Rhode Island Red (2 page)

My next move seemed clear.

My apartment is a floor-through on First Avenue between Seventeenth and Eighteenth. Pretty good morning light. Not too noisy on the front. Furnished in high sharecropper chic.

Sig was cross-legged on the kitchen floor. It turned out his head was bleeding from the fall he'd taken, so he sat pressing a folded patch of gauze against his hair. He studied the walls while I put the finishing touches on one of my signature dishes—fresh sardines deep fried in Greek olive oil and thin linguine with garlic and little green peas.

“I like that one!” he said, pointing at the Huey Newton poster that I'd hung upside down.

“That one's great, too.” He meant Lady Day near death, which had cost me about a hundred dollars to frame.

“I don't know about that one,” he said doubtfully, nodding at Walter's autographed photo of Magic Johnson with his bad boy guru smile.

“Dinner,” I announced. “Get up off the floor.”

I set a steaming plate in front of him along with a cold glass of cheap white wine. He made a face.

“What is this? This is not the kind of stuff you feed a street musician. We need more protein … like cheeseburgers.”

I cursed him in gutter French.

“Did you call me something bad?” He adjusted the makeshift headband he'd tied on in order to keep the gauze in position. “Well, that's okay. I still love you desperately.”

I couldn't help but laugh. Up close, I could see that little Sig was quite a bit older than he looked at first glance—what said it were those little drinking lines around the base of his nose. There was something else that did not escape my notice: tell-tale wrinkles, dirty hair and all, little Sig was quite pretty. I wondered what he'd done to make his lady put him out.

He ate his food like a good boy, even paying me a compliment or two on it, after he got used to the taste.

“Sweetness,” he said, wiping his mouth, “if you make a living playing that sax, I'm Louis Armstrong. Who are you really?”

“Really? My real name is Simone.”

“No kidding? Simone What?”

“Signoret.”

“Huh. That's kind of a pretty name.”

This child, I decided, was from an outer sphere.

Then, while I did the dishes, he began to rattle on about the saxophone and all its glory. God, what a torrent of reverently uttered names and birthplaces, record dates and sidemen. Coleman and Prez and Bird and Sonny and Jug and Trane and Bippity Boppedy Boo. I finally sent him off for a shower, hoping it would calm him down.

I picked up the bunch of brown straps he'd taken off his wrists and left on the kitchen table. They were made of flimsy Indian leather, still stiff with newness, and the head of a bald eagle was embossed on each strap. It made me smile; I used to have a thing for cheap bracelets, too. And I also liked wearing them in bunches. See, just wearing two or three of them won't get it. You have to put on dozens. For some reason, the sheer number of them cancels out their essential tackiness.

I lit one of Sig's cigarettes and sat down to look at my mail, all those bills I had no way of paying now that Walt and his salary were gone.

I had a second smoke and polished off the lousy chardonnay.

He reappeared twenty minutes or so later—calm, clean, hair slicked back and glistening, torso bared—and a nice torso it was—thin but basically flawless.

One of my extravagant white Fieldcrest bath towels was knotted low on his hips, and inside it, where stomach meets thigh, was a little palm tree. He looked at me while I looked at him.

“Ah,” I said, and kept looking.

He smiled slyly. “I am your slave,” he pronounced.

“Ah,” I said.

“Where's the bedroom?”

“Mine?” I asked after a minute. “Or yours?”

“Ah,” he said sadly, and shrugged.

Yes, thank God he was older and more sensible than he looked.

We took the old futon out of the hall closet and rolled it out on the living room floor.

“Listen, Sig,” I told him as I turned out the light, “coffee's at seven-thirty. Then out you go.”

“But I'm your slave—”

“Hey, Siggy? Being a person of color, that is not my favorite word in the English language.”

I took his laugh as a sign that he was finally giving up.

“Gets pretty cool in here at night,” I said. “Summer's over, you know.”

“Guess I better put on my pants then.”

“Guess you better.”

Around 3
A.M.
I woke up achy and shivering. I felt the cold air creeping around the corners of my room like a wild cat prowling a canyon. I wondered if that fool had gone during the night and left the apartment door open.

Furious, I walked into the kitchen. Sure enough, the door was wide open. I banged it shut … then banged it a second time, because the lock wouldn't catch.

I flipped on the light, all sorts of wild things in my mind—he'd robbed the shit out of me; he'd gone out for pizza and decided not to return, so someone else had robbed the shit out of me …

But no.

He was right there. On the floor.

With a blade sticking out of his throat.

I did the corny silent scream as my legs gave way and I began to sink. It took forever for my knees to finally hit the linoleum.

On the floor between us lay a small Velcro ankle holster with a blunt steel gray gun nestled inside it.

On the outside of the holster was a photo ID shrink-wrapped in plastic. I pulled it closer with my foot and looked at the picture of Sig, who was in real life—or had been—Charles A. Conlin, of the New York Police Department.

CHAPTER 2

In walked Bud

Two uniformed cops came first. They looked at the body but didn't touch it.

The EMS guys came next. They touched but didn't move. Then along came one Detective Butko, who, to use the vernacular, took my statement. As we talked, the technicians started to file in—all looking as if they had TB. My little apartment, so private and anonymous until a few short hours ago, was swollen with city payrollers. All of them men. Loud and gross and way past the point of caring. The one slobbering all over my busted door looked ready to shed his old skin any minute.

“How come you didn't hear anything?” Butko asked me.

“For the same reason,” I told him, “I wouldn't hear it if you played a rap song in this room right now.”

My hatred for rap music was so overwhelming that I had actually developed the ability to tune it out—deny that it existed. I hated violent death just as much. Yet Sig's body was still there in my kitchen.

Then, about five-thirty in the morning, the clock stopped, so to speak. The apartment was at capacity now, but it had grown strangely quiet. They were all standing around … waiting. Poor Sig/Conlin was waiting too, in his way.

I wanted nothing more at the moment than a piece of paper and a pencil.

I mean, I know how crass it sounds, a young guy laying there dead and all. But since there was nothing anybody could do to change that, I thought the least I could do was get off a few lines about the thing. All the time I was speaking to Butko, the words were sort of floating across my eyes like they were being spat out of a teletype machine. Something like “Butterflies never die but just tremble and vanish.” Lord! … butterflies trembling and vanishing would have made my grad school advisor at NYU vomit. But that was last year and this was this year.

I took down the big glass percolator my mother had given me. She had somehow managed to ignore every reminder over the years that I despised perked coffee and never used anything but a drip pot. I wonder where I get my willful nature from. For a few minutes everyone watched hypnotized while the glass pot bubbled and shook. I don't know when it happened, but a minute later I realized that all eyes had turned to me.

The nightgown I had on was right out of George Sand. Good cotton, good lace and loads of it, hand rolled hem, and diaphanous as hell. I looked down furtively and saw how clearly, aggressively, my dark breasts were outlined against the fabric. I felt a stab of shame for every time I had lain there, proud, loving it, while a man delighted in them.

Each and every one of these strange men was looking at my nipples—focusing—concentrating—on them. And it meant nothing to them that they were dealing with a lady who was going to do the definitive translation of
A Season in Hell
.

I wondered briefly, insanely, if this was going to escalate one glance, one wordless movement at a time, until I ended up raped and torn apart and dead—framed, conveniently, for Officer Conlin's murder. It would be one of those grotesque cover-ups no one would find out about for forty years.

For whom should I whore?

The first line of my Rimbaud translation came back to me then.

For whom should I whore

Which beast shall I worship?

What madonna should I ravish?

What heart should I profane?

What lies should I live by?

In whose blood should I swim?

The committee had thrown the thesis right back in my face thanks to that translation.

I was relieved to see that the men had stopped staring. Except Sig, of course. How long were they going to leave that dead man there?

“For godsakes,” I said to Butko, “can't you at least pull that knife out of his neck?”

“Not a knife, honey,” he said, searching for sugar in the cabinet above my refrigerator. “It's an ice pick.”

Who was he calling honey, and where the fuck did he think he was—Little Rock?

Before I could ask, a black man burst though the half-open door, scattering lab men like milk bottles. He had a baseball hat turned around backwards on his head. And he was wearing painter's pants and a dirty flannel shirt buttoned right up to the neck. His Fu Manchu moustache and battered old guitar completed the picture.

“Okay, Leman, Okay!” shouted Butko, gripping the man by the arm. Leman shook him off violently. He walked over to the covered body and straddled it.

I heard him ask the corpse in a weird voice: “Charlie, is that you?”

The rest of what he said was lost to me. Just muffled, strangling sounds—“Oh, my, oh, my,” I thought I heard him say. Or perhaps it was “Oh, man, oh, man.”

In a minute he began to cry. It was something wild and hideous.

And then he picked up the guitar and smashed it into smithereens against the cabinet. Every soul in the room ran—ran like hell—away from this Leman.

I sat in the living room on the tatty divan I had paid my neighbor's kids to haul upstairs last year. The cops and the rest of the men had slowly filtered back into the kitchen and were wrapping things up. I heard the labored, inevitable sound of Sig being dragged across the kitchen in his plastic shroud. Finally, he was out of my house. The sun was out now.

“Tell me a story.”

I looked up into the dark wide face of Detective Leman Sweet. He hulked over me, sucking the air out of the room.

“I already told him,” I replied, pointing to Butko.

“Tell me!”

I did. The whole story. All the while staring into the bottom of my coffee cup.

Leman Sweet grinned when I finished talking. He moved even closer to me and undid the top button of his shirt. “You're a lying cunt,” he stated.

I got to my feet. He hit me with the heel of his hand, crashing against my shoulder and knocking me back down. The cold coffee in my mug splashed out onto his face. I looked to Butko for help. He never moved.

“Did he fuck you?” Sweet asked.

“No.”

“Yeah, he did. Charlie fucked you. Did you like that?”

I said nothing. My knees were trembling.

“You like little white boys, don't you?”

I said nothing.

“Answer me! You … like … white … dick … don't you!”

I figured there was nothing to lose. He was going to kill me, anyway. So I got one in: “Actually, I prefer Samoans.”

Butko laughed.

“You got Charlie all hot, didn't you?” Sweet went on. “You turned a trick, didn't you? What are you—a college girl? You movin' on up, don't like to do it the old fashioned way. You want it all—fast. You don't want to push a mop no more, huh? Got to have it fast. Expensive. So you can keep that cue ball head of yours all clean and smelling sweet.”

Maybe he will exhaust himself in a few minutes, I thought. If I just sit here. Maybe he'll stop and go away. Maybe he'll just die.

He caught sight of my sax just then. He walked over to it in its open case.

“This yours? You play it?”

“Yes it's mine, yes I play it.”

He kicked the case halfway across the room.

“You play it on the street?”

“Anything in particular you'd like to hear?”

He came rushing at me.

“Leman!” Butko shouted.

He got a hold of himself. “Take a good look at me, girl. Because you going to see me again. And you going to talk to me again … Understand?”

No! I wanted to scream it into his face. No, I do not understand, you moron! But I just sat there.

At last, he backed off. I heard him cussing as he ran down the stairs.

Detective Butko looked at me for a long time without speaking. “You better change the lock,” he said finally. “Just to be on the safe side.” I guess that was about as close as I was going to come to getting some concern or sympathy from our public guardians. I chuckled audibly and Butko gave me a funny look.

He walked back into the kitchen. A few minutes later he was gone.

I went and closed the door quietly behind him—for all the good that was going to do. I laughed when I thought back to that question Sig had asked me: Who are you really? I should have been the one to ask him that.

What I wanted to do was rage and scream and put my fist through a wall. But there had been enough violent acting-out in my home. I was wrung out—and just really sad.