The Last Street Novel (39 page)

“Did you?” the partner asked him back.

Shareef shook his head and remained silent. He didn’t even bother to answer that.

The lead detective asked, “So, how did Michael Springfield get in touch with you?”

Shareef looked up and said, “Believe it or not, he was reading my books. That’s where the majority of my five percent of reading men come from. Prison. You believe that shit? That’s fuckin’ sad, man. But it’s the truth.”

The partner said, “Look, we don’t want to hear your damn politics.”

The lead detective countered with a thoughtful nod. He said, “Yeah, but if you think about it, it makes more sense to me now. So if you say that most of the men who read your books are in prison, and these guys who were after you are one foot in, one foot out of jail anyway, then it makes the most sense in the world for them to want to stop you. You’re writing directly to their peer group. And all of these jailbirds know each other.”

Shareef had never thought of it that way. Male prisoners were indeed a niche group of readers. They just weren’t able to buy many books. But they read them when they got them.

Shareef said, “But I don’t even write those kind of books.”

“Yeah, but this book would have been that kind,” the detective noted.

Shareef agreed with him. He said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He ran with that discovery and tried a brand-new approach to get himself quickly out of guilt.

He eyed both detectives and said, “But here’s what it is, Officers. At the end of the day, I have no criminal record whatsoever. Not even for jaywalking. I got a wife. I got two kids. I make my living writing romance books for women. I’m a college graduate, and I just got caught up in some crazy-ass bullshit back home in Harlem—because that’s what this shit is—and I can guarantee that I’ll never get caught up in this street shit again. I can promise you that. ’Cause all this right here is ridiculous. I can’t even believe I’m sitting here.”

The partner said, “But you are sitting here, Shareef. And we have
fifteen
homicides to solve.”

Shareef snapped, “Well, solve them then. Y’all know who pulled the triggers. And it wasn’t me. Not one of them. Y’all know that shit already.”

He said, “All I did was run for my fuckin’ life up here. So at this point, I’ve said about all I’m gon’ say, and y’all know how the story go; you can talk to my lawyer. And I’d like to make my phone call now.”

All of the conversation in the room just stopped. No one knew what else to say. But Shareef looked heated and was still irritated by the pain of his injuries that still had not been tended to.

The lead detective sighed and told his partner, “Let me talk to him for a minute.”

The Latino partner nodded and left the room.

Okay, here we go,
Shareef told himself again.
Now he wants to make his personal statements to another black man.

The detective sat on the edge of the table while Shareef prepared himself to hear whatever.

The detective stated in low tones, black man to black man.

He said, “I know your type, Shareef. You all think you’re above the law. And I’m not talking about a black or white thing here, because I’ve been around white boys, too. Matter of fact, the white boys are the worse. So I celebrate with a drink every time one of you assholes gets sent off to jail.”

Shareef stopped him and asked, “What exact
type
are you talking about?” He had an idea, he just wanted to hear the detective say it.

The detective answered, “You know what the hell I’m talking about. You smart enough. Ain’t you? You give a man a little bit more money than the next man, and he starts thinking he’s smarter than everybody, and that he deserves some type of special privilege. So when he fucks up real bad, he thinks he’s smart enough to get away with it. But he don’t want to be treated like some average street con. Oh, no, this nigga got lawyers working for him. The best lawyers in the business. And he’s on top of the pecking order. So he never do his own dirt, nor does he want to clean up his own shit afterward.”

Shareef shook his head and said, “You don’t know nothing about me, man. I’m no damn criminal. I’m not stealing from the stock exchanges. I’m not robbing the poor. I’m not taking old people’s pensions and overcharging people who don’t have health insurance for medicine. You got the wrong guy, man. I’m not him.”

The detective leaned back and nodded. What could he hit Shareef with that would stick?

He said, “You say you got a wife and kids, right? And you write books for women?”

Shareef just stared at him. “What’s your point?”

The detective asked him, “You got a girlfriend or two you see on the side?”

Shareef didn’t flinch, but he was caught off guard by it. He thought to himself,
This motherfucker’s just looking for anything to get under my skin with.

Then he had a question of his own. He said with an honest face, “Well, let me ask you a question, Detective. Are police officers jealous motherfuckers before they take the job, or is that just a part of your training?”

The detective cracked a smile, chuckled and nodded.

He said, “You may get away with your bullshit in this life, Shareef, but it’s gon’ catch back up to you when you approach the gates of heaven. You just remember that somebody told you that. And all this after the community made a decent effort to clean up St. Nick’s and keep it safe.”

When he finished his private conversation, he stood up from the table and slapped his heavy hand against Shareef’s left shoulder.

“Ahh, shit,” Shareef whined and winced.

The detective stopped and told him, “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. You hurt yourself there, didn’t you?” And he walked up out of the room.

Shareef rubbed his badly bruised shoulder with his right hand and stared into the empty space of the room. The detective had gotten his point across. How did heaven look down on him? Shareef had to think about that himself. And he felt guilty, as if the gates would not open for him.

Nevertheless, while Shareef was still on earth, his intentions were to remain a free man. So he planned to stick to the script.

C
HARLES
P
ICKETT ARRIVED
at the Harlem police station, pronto, to pick up his grandson and to make sure he was safe. He expected a fight to do so, and he was ready for it with his active NAACP membership card. He had in his mind to let the officers know that he would be back with a well-publicized lawsuit if he experienced any problems. But when he walked into the station and let the desk clerk know who he was and who he was there for, they responded with unusual speed.

“We’ll have him right out for you, Mr. Pickett.”

“Thank you,” he told them. And he waited patiently at the front for his only grandson.

Inside of a second interrogation room on the second floor, the lead detective and his partner were asking questions of T, who had been arrested at the scene of the shoot-out, while firing two automatic pistols into the air.

“So, you say you had no idea why you were there?” the lead detective asked him.

T looked up at him from his chair behind the interrogation table as if it pained him to answer. He was still pretty spotless as compared to everyone else who had been picked up at the scene.

He answered, “Yeah, like I said, we had beef.”

“Beef over what?” the partner asked him. “You had to be beefing over something. How did you all end up at the same place?”

T shook his head and muttered, “When you down for your team, you down for your team. It don’t matter what the beef is. So that’s how it went down. I just went in for my team.”

The two detectives continued to look at each other to try and figure things out.

The lead asked, “Have you ever heard of Shareef Crawford, the book writer?”

T looked up and grimaced. “Who?” It wasn’t as if he had read any of his books or anything.

The two detectives looked at each other again and shook their own heads.

The lead asked him, “So, you’re ready to go to jail for assault, illegal possession of a handgun, reckless endangerment, and murder, and all you have to say about it is that you were down for your team?”

T looked him in the eye and didn’t flinch. He answered, “All I know is that my man was killed in the beef. But I didn’t shoot nobody. I was just there for backup.”

The partner asked him, “You were only there for backup? Well, who shot the guy named Trap in the back?”

T shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know who shot him. A lot of people got shot out there today. And they were both dead when I got there.”

The partner said, “And didn’t they find you with two pistols in your hands, firing away like a madman? That’s what we heard?”

T looked down at the table and said, “I just took the guns and started shooting them in the air after I got there.”

“Why?” the lead detective asked him.

T looked up at him as if he was crazy.

He said, “Because I was mad. My man had just got killed.”

Again, the officers looked at each other before they were interrupted by a knock on the door.

“Yeah,” the lead detective answered it.

A uniformed officer stuck his head into the room and said, “We got a pickup here for Shareef Crawford.”

“Who is it?” the detective asked him.

“His grandfather.”

The detective looked at his partner before they both walked out of the room to see for themselves.

W
HEN
S
HAREEF STRUGGLED
to walk down from the holding room with his one bag of luggage, the Latino partner spotted him heading toward his grandfather, and he asked the lead detective, “So we’re not even gonna try and hold him for a day? What if someone else ends up dead when he leaves here?”

The lead detective shook it off. “We still don’t have enough to hold him with. We know he was at both places, and we know that he ran both times. But everything else that we
think
we know, we still have to prove. So we have to gather up more of the guys out here who are still alive and willing to talk to us about it. And so far, that hasn’t happened.”

He said, “Now if we could charge him for being stupid and for getting involved with these people in the first place, he would definitely be staying here tonight. But until we have more concrete information, we let him go, and when we have something, we’ll go get him and bring him back.”

He added, “He’s definitely gonna have to stand trial. So he’s not going anywhere. All we need is time.”

The partner sighed. He still didn’t agree with letting Shareef go that easily, but what could he do about it? The older, veteran detective knew better.

W
HEN
S
HAREEF CLIMBED
into the back of a cab with his grandfather, he grimaced again from the stinging pain of his injuries.

His grandfather looked at him and asked, “Do I need to take you over to the hospital first?”

Shareef shook it off. “Nah, I just need some ice and some bandages. That’s all the hospital is gonna do. So I’ll be all right. I don’t have any broken bones, just bad bruises.”

His grandfather nodded to him. And as much as he admired his grandson’s adventurous nature, there came a time when enough was enough, and that time had come.

So his grandfather cleared his throat and told him, “Now, Shareef, you gon’ need to take some good advice after all of this here.”

Shareef took a deep breath and figured as much. He may have been a grown man, but that didn’t excuse him from being called out for his bad decisions. A grown man needed correcting just as much as a young man when he was wrong, and Shareef was in no position to argue.

He mumbled, “Yeah, I know.”

His grandfather nodded to him. He said, “But knowing it and doing something about it are too different things. See, ’cause a man can know that he has cancer, and do nothing about it until it’s time for his deathbed.”

Shareef listened and silently nodded back to him. What else could he do?

“Well, I’m not trying to watch my grandson go to his deathbed before I tell him what changes he needs to make in his life,” his grandfather told him.

Shareef heard the word “changes” and reacted to it instinctively. He began to fidget and twist up his face as if the word hurt him as much as his left side did. He didn’t like to make
changes
unless he was the one deciding to make them.

His grandfather knew as much. You don’t raise a boy from his infancy to middle age without knowing what kind of a man he is. Shareef was a bull, a ram, a lion, and a grizzly bear, all rolled up into one. So his grandfather scrambled to be logical before he could raise up on his hind legs, charge forward, claw, and buck his grandfather off of him.

“Now Shareef, I’ve watched you make decisions on what you wanted to do for your entire life, and it’s been mostly a blessing for me. I liked seeing a young man take charge of himself.”

Charles Pickett raised his index finger and added, “Of course, your grandmother thought differently on a number of occasions, but I always managed to fight her off so you could be a man.” He said, “You know, because sometimes a woman can get involved and mess up the process of a man learning himself. And that’s when you end up with these young men who don’t know how to take charge and be a man.”

The African cabdriver overheard the advice being dished by the grandfather in the back of his car, and he couldn’t help but smile. He agreed with him wholeheartedly. There were far too many womanish men in America for his own taste, a bunch of soft men who made too many excuses for themselves.

The grandfather added, “But there have been those times, Shareef, when I had to agree with my wife, and this happens to be one of them.”

He said, “Now I’ve watched you work hard to build yourself into the kind of proud man that other men find it very easy to admire, but at the same time, you still have this reckless shit that you do, every now and then, that you still need to learn how to grow up out of.”

He said, “Now maybe you need to learn how to play golf or something to get away from those tendencies.”

Shareef heard the word “golf” and began to smile. He just wasn’t a golf-playing man.

His grandfather read the smile on his face and asked him, “Now what does that mean? You think golf is a sissy game, don’t you? And you don’t think Tiger Woods is a real athlete because he hits golf balls instead of people.”

Shareef shook it off. “I didn’t say that. Tiger Woods is the beast. That’s why they call him Tiger. I’m just not into playing golf.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to do something, Shareef,” his grandfather told him. “Because you can’t keep doing what you been doing.” He said, “And you know they called your wife up about this, don’t you?”

Shareef looked alarmed by the information. “They what?”

Charles watched as the cabdriver approached his home in the Morningside Heights area next to Columbia University. He told him, “Hey, right here.”

The cabdriver eased on the brakes and came to a stop in the street. Charles figured he would finish the conversation with his grandson once they were out of the taxi. So they climbed out, paid the driver, and pulled Shareef’s one bag of luggage from the trunk.

“Thank you,” Charles told the driver. And as soon as he was alone outside of the house with his grandson, they picked back up on their conversation.

Shareef asked him, “So you say they called my wife?” That was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear. It caught him off guard.

“The police called her before you called us. They were looking for you everywhere,” his grandfather answered him. “So then Jennifer gets on the phone all shaken up, and lets your grandmother have it with everything. She starts talking about how you left the house, and all the little groupie girls who’ve been after you, and how she thinks about divorce, and what about the kids, and the marriage counseling, and she just broke down in tears about everything. That’s why your grandmother didn’t want to talk to you when you called. She started looking at me and saying it was my fault, and that it was up to me to fix it.”

Shareef looked into his grandfather’s face and let out a deep sigh before he looked away. What could he say about all of that? He realized he wasn’t in the world alone. No man was. He had a wife, kids, grandparents and friends whom he all loved, and he had to answer to all of them with his actions and reactions.

Whether he liked it or not, everything he did affected them. So he nodded his head to his grandfather and said nothing. He still didn’t know what to say.

His grandfather placed a soft hand on Shareef’s right shoulder and told him, “There comes a time, Shareef, when a man has to pull his own ideas and behavior into line with those he loves around him. Now that don’t mean that you stop going for your dreams and aspirations, but it does means that you have to think first about what that means to everyone else. You have to think more about how you make those things happen in a balance, so that you don’t end up pulling yourself too far away from everything that really means something to you. Because, see, I know how much cotton candy is out here, believe me, but I also know how much you love your wife.”

Shareef suddenly felt like a little boy again in his grandfather’s wise hands. He didn’t want to hear the lecture. He didn’t want to hear the hard answers. He didn’t want to hear about his marriage. Nor did he want to hear the truth about maturity, but he had to.

His grandfather told him, “Now you can have all these people out here who fake like they love you, but they only love you for as long as you’re a celebrity in the limelight. They don’t love you when it gets dark. They only love you when the lights are on. And they don’t love you when you’re old and slower moving. They only love you when you’re young, slim, and quick on your feet. You hear me?”

Shareef got the point and smiled. It wasn’t as if he had never heard it all before, he just needed to hear it again and he appreciated the timing.

He said, “So, Grandmom probably won’t speak to me right now, will she?”

Charles laughed and showed his teeth. “Oh, you already know that. You just got
both
of us in the doghouse. But at least you’re all right. Now let’s go on in here and take care of these bruises.”

Shareef followed his grandfather into the house, and he was glad to be back there. But as soon as they walked in, he heard his grandmother’s feet moving through the hallway upstairs and toward the bedroom, where she slammed the door shut behind her.

Bloom
!

Wilma Pickett had been waiting at the top of the stairs for Shareef to arrive at her home so she could show him her fierce disapproval of his recent behavior.

Shareef took another exhausting breath and shook his head. He was going to have to apologize to his grandmother after he apologized to his wife. He already knew the deal, he just had to prepare himself for it.

“Now let’s get you out of these clothes,” his grandfather told him.

Shareef grimaced as they took off his bloodstained shirt for a second time. Then they pulled off his blue jeans and shoes. His left shoulder, ribs, hip, and thigh were all purple, black, and blue. His body was stained and sticky from dried up blood, and he was swollen in several places from the lack of ice or care of his wounds.