The Plot Against Hip Hop (2 page)
A red-eyed D was listening to Rakim’s “Lyrics of Fury” on his iPod when the two patrolmen arrived.
I
own The Relentless Beat myself,” Fly Ty said as he laid out the crime scene photos on his cluttered NYPD desk. “Man, this hurts me too. He was one of the few motherfuckers who cared to know the history of our music … though he did spend too much time trying to justify that rap shit to suit me.” Fly Ty, a.k.a. Detective Tyrone Williams, stood with his hands on the sides of his blue pin-striped suit. His white shirt was crisp and his blue tie was tasteful. His gray hair was cut short and his sideburns just long enough to let you know why everyone called him Fly Ty. Underneath that suit was a fit body whose age was only betrayed by a small, soft pouch of flesh just below his belly. Otherwise Fly Ty looked like he could still fit in a patrolman’s uniform and shame every rookie in his precinct.
While D stared mournfully at the photos of the late author, the detective asked if he had moved the body.
“Just touched his neck, trying to stop the bleeding, and took that tape out of his hand. But obviously he wasn’t attacked in my hallway.”
“Nope,” Fly Ty agreed as he sat down behind his desk, smoothed out his tie, and looked up at D. The two men had met when D was a ten-year-old and Ty was the best-dressed flatfoot walking the mean streets of Brownsville. Now the detective picked up a file and read,
“Dwayne Robinson was attacked on Crosby, near Prince, right behind the Dean & Deluca delivery door. A Mexican worker and a yoga instructor described the attackers as two young men—one definitely black, about nineteen, and the other either Latino or light-skinned black. Both slim and about six feet. Both wearing red doo rags and tracksuits. They were seen getting into—”
“What? A red Range Rover?”
“No. A dark-colored SUV driven by another man, but the two witnesses differ as to his racial background.”
“At least they spared us a red car.”
“Who’s
they
?”
“The motherfuckers determined to make it look like some Bloods stabbed my man in a gang initiation.”
“Aside from the location,” Fly Ty suggested, “that’s what it looks like.”
To which D said, “Bullshit,” loud enough that two white detectives glanced over, wondering who had the balls to curse in the direction of the formidable veteran.
“C’mon, Fly Ty, this shit happens in the hood, not Soho. Kids like that don’t drive into white neighborhoods in Manhattan to do this.”
“Relax,” Fly Ty said. “These kinds of stabbings do happen on the Upper West Side near MLK High and in Union Square near Washington Irving High.”
“But there’s no high school in Soho—unless they’re now holding remedial reading classes in the back of D&D.”
The two men fell silent for a moment. D picked up one of the photos and looked at Dwayne’s neck and saw how deep the wound was. “It’s too easy, Fly Ty. If it’s Bloods, it’s a random attack. Easy to explain. Easy to file away.”
“You should teach Police Academy courses since you seem to know so damn much,” Fly Ty replied, then gathered another file from his desk. “Got most of this off Google.
Dwayne Robinson. Fifty. Music critic/historian. Resides in Montclair, New Jersey. Wife: Danielle.
Published a number of books. Taught journalism at Columbia J School. Through the years he wrote some nasty reviews of some famous folks. Pissed off quite a few people. But bad reviews are rarely motives for murder. No gambling debts. No drug use. No serious affairs, though there were rumors he might have strayed with a coed or two.” He set the file down. “Let’s say it was a hit, D. Why would someone pay two knuckleheads to wet up the good professor?”
D’s answer was, “Let’s listen to the tape.”
The interrogation room smelled of body odor and stale cologne, and had that gray-green institutional color scheme. It was a strange place to listen to the rhymes of Moe Dee and Busy Bee blasting out of an ancient boom box that someone had found in the evidence room.
To Fly Ty this was typical “young nigga gibberish.”
To D it was a great freestyle battle. “Really legendary. They did this at the Harlem World Disco on the corner of Lenox and 116th Street, across from Malcolm’s mosque.”
“Nice black history moment, D. What’s it got to do with Robinson’s death?”
D frowned, not sure what to say.
Fly Ty opened another file and quickly scanned it. “His wife said he came into the city to have drinks with his editor, which has been confirmed. He told Ms. Wolfe that he was working on a memoir/revisionist hip hop history. That meeting ended about eight p.m. He ended up at your door around ten-thirty. Two and a half hours. That’s plenty of time for a man to get in trouble in New York City.”
D stopped the tape, fast-forwarded to the end, flipped it over, and pressed play. No more MC battle. A hip hop beat filled the room and two voices could barely be heard underneath. “That’s Dwayne right there,” D said. “I don’t recognize the other one. You gonna send this to CSI?”
Fly Ty sighed at the now all-too-common question. “When I get it back from the sound lab, maybe we’ll be able to identify the other voice.”
“So,” D wondered, “how much time you gonna put into this?”
“We’ll see. The antigang task force will be brought in. They’ll probably wanna talk to you.”
“But what about you? You’re a top detective. If you make it a priority, it’ll be one.”
“Look,” Fly Ty answered, “despite what you might have heard about crime dropping in New York, we get dead bodies every day. I got three other cases in my lap. He’s your friend. That means something to me. But I ain’t dropping everything for this. At least not without more to go on.”
After his unsatisfying afternoon with Fly Ty, D walked down Crosby, from Howard to the back of Dean & Deluca on Prince, where he turned west to Broadway, striding through the crowds exiting the R station and the Armani Exchange. He passed through shoppers and yogis and delivery boys into his building, and then went up the elevator to his office on the tenth floor of 580 Broadway. He stood in front of the door with keys in hand, staring down for a moment at where the janitor had mopped up the blood, before entering.
The stench of disinfectant filled the office as D pulled out his hardcover edition of
The Relentless Beat
. In the hierarchy of music literature it wasn’t quite
Blues People
,
Mystery Train
, or
The Death of Rhythm & Blues
. But Dwayne Robinson’s book was still taught at a lot of colleges and he had continued to lecture from it every Black History Month. He had inscribed this copy to the bodyguard:
My man D. Keep on dreamin’
.
D closed the book and slid out his BlackBerry. A few years back he’d stopped three teenagers from lighting a homeless man on fire at the Canal Street A station. He’d later befriended one of the kids and used him for odd jobs from time to time. Now he called Ray Ray.
“Two guys who looked like Bloods stabbed a friend of mine to death in Soho the other night.”
“Bloods in Soho? Hmmm. That’s some new shit.”
“Yeah, well, I need to find them. They drove off in a Range Rover.” D gave the young man the details he knew about what they looked like.
Ray Ray said, “You know this ain’t the Mafia. It’s not like it’s one family. Niggas be freelancing all over the place.”
“I’ll give you $200 for your time and another $800 if you find out something useful.”
“Well,” Ray Ray responded, “I better make myself useful.”
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he cuts on Dwayne’s neck and face were sealed for the funeral and the morticians even managed to put on his trademark lopsided grin so that the writer would face eternity with that same mischievous look that those who knew him best so treasured. The local Baptist church on Orange was filled with a who’s-who of the folks Dwayne had written about so eloquently—Spike Lee, Anita Baker, Whitney Houston, Chuck D, Prince, Vernon Reid, and so many others. Many of his subjects had become friends.
With all this black pop royalty at the funeral, there was one person conspicuous by his absence. Walter Gibbs had known Dwayne since both were young hustling dudes trying to make it in the intense, innovative New York of the early 1980s. Dwayne had chronicled his parties and profiled the acts he managed. Walter had become rich; Dwayne had become respected. A huge wreath with Gibbs’s name on it at the funeral parlor led several mourners to wonder aloud, “Where the fuck is Gibbs?” D didn’t speculate. He just filed the fact away.
Dwayne had been one of those people who everybody knew, who connected people like spokes on a wheel. D was younger than most of the artists there and yet he’d been touched by Dwayne Robinson too. Russell Simmons, who’d known Dwayne well since they first met years back at a roller disco in Queens, gave an amusing eulogy about their adventures in rap’s formative years. Anita Baker, Dwayne’s favorite singer, performed “No One in the World,” a song not ideally suited for a funeral but one Dwayne’s wife said he would have wanted.
The casket wasn’t too heavy. D had been the pallbearer in many previous funerals, so he’d come to appreciate a light corpse, no matter how heartless that was. Dwayne’s spirit, his essence, had been taken by a killer or killers unknown. What was inside the box that D helped carry meant nothing compared to the collective memory of what Dwayne had achieved during his unexpectedly brief life.
At one point D sat down in the living room of the Robinson’s comfy three-story home with a plate in his lap, listening more than talking as people dined on soul food and sweet-potato pie and reminisced about Dwayne and the world that shaped him. D soon found himself, quite happily, squeezed into a corner with Grandmaster Flash and Kool Moe Dee talking about a rap tour circa 1984. He asked if Moe had any idea why Dwayne was carrying a copy of his famous battle during his last night on earth.
“I wish I knew,” Moe said. “I wish I knew. We’d stayed in contact over the years. Any time he did a reading or had an event in Los Angeles, he’d invite me. We’d talk about the ’80s. In fact, he seemed very interested in the period around ’88, ’89. Talked about doing a book. Guess we’ll never know what he was up to.”
Danielle Robinson, a petite woman whose graying hair contrasted with bright, youthful black eyes, came over and offered D another plate. He felt awkward about being the last person to see her husband alive; he was embarrassed in her presence. When he told her he was already full, Danielle reached out and took his large hands in her slender fingers. “My husband really liked you,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied, fumbling for words, “he was great to me. Like a big brother who made sure you listened to all the right records and read all the right books.”
“Thank you for trying to save him.”
Again D struggled in response, making sounds and not syllables before falling into silence and feeling a tear drop from one eye. Suddenly the little woman had her arms around the waist of the massive man, offering comforting words as he wept. In her kindness, Danielle allowed D to go upstairs, away from the eyes of those gathered in the living room, to a guest bathroom on the second floor where he could wash his face and regain his composure. Perhaps, he thought, I’m not as used to death as I tell myself.
D was standing at the top of the landing when he noticed more stairs leading to the attic where Dwayne kept his office. He’d been up there once to do an interview about the trials of bodyguarding rap stars for a script the writer had been working on. D knew it would be an intrusion, maybe a touch disrespectful, but he couldn’t help himself. He headed up the stairs.
A large black-and-white photo of a screaming Otis Redding in a sharkskin suit was taped to the door. The singer had been a favorite of Dwayne’s mother, and D’s mother had liked him too—though she was more of the Teddy Pendergrass generation of black-love men. D would have preferred to linger on that convergence of taste, but opening the door to Dwayne’s office welcomed him to a harsh new reality.
The room was a shambles. Manuscript pages strewn across the floor. An old mahogany desk overturned. CDs and books were sliding onto the floor from a ceiling-high bookcase. Judging by the white cords still plugged into outlets, Dwayne’s computers had been removed. Ironically, the framed pictures on the wall looked untouched: Dwayne with Anita Baker, with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with Eazy-E, with Q-Tip. D stared at the disarray and the photos and thought he was gonna tear up again, but he pushed the feeling back down. It was enough having to tell Danielle her house had been broken into during her husband’s funeral. He wasn’t going to do it looking like a whiny bitch.
Danielle waited until most of the guests had left before calling the police.
“This is terrible,” she said.
D sat silent, unsure for a moment what to say on a day that had turned from very sad to horrible. “Was he working on a book?”
“Yes. He was calling it
The Plot Against Hip Hop
.”
“Hell of a title.”
“I thought so too. I thought it sounded melodramatic. But he kept telling me it was his best book yet. The one he’d be remembered for. And now this.”
D held Danielle Robinson, feeling her shake as she endured another loss, another violation of her world. “It was all a dream.” That’s what D said.
The Montclair police were remarkably nice. One of the patrolmen told D that Dwayne had gotten name recording artists to perform at charitable events in the area over the years and was extremely well liked in town. D gave the cop, a brother named Fred Harris, his card and asked him to let him know what they found. He also made sure he passed on Fly Ty’s number since this robbery made Dwayne’s murder clearly more than a gang initiation. Dwayne had died for “something.” It wasn’t random. Not at all.
