The Twelfth Card (26 page)

He’d explained: “Spies.”

“What?”

“No, not like CIA spies.
Industrial
spies—from our competitors. My company made over six billion dollars last year and I’m responsible for a good chunk of that. People would love to find out what I know about the market.”

“Companies really do that?” Jeanne had asked.

“You never really know about people,” had been his response.

And Jeanne Starke, who had a rod imbedded in her arm where it’d been shattered by a whisky bottle a few years ago, had thought: You never did, true. She now wiped her hands on her apron, walked to the curtain and looked out.

The man was gone.

Okay, stop spooking yourself. It’s—

But wait . . . She saw motion on the front steps. And believed she saw a corner of a bag—a shopping bag—sitting on the porch. The man was here!

What was going on?

Should she call her boyfriend?

Should she call the police?

But they were at least ten minutes away.

“There’s somebody outside, Mommy,” Britney called.

Jeanne stepped forward fast. “Brit, you stay in your room. I’ll see.”

But the girl was opening the front door.

“No!” Jeanne called.

And heard: “Thanks, honey,” Thompson Boyd said in a friendly drawl as he stepped inside the house, toting the shopping bag she’d seen.

“You gave me a fright,” Jeanne said. She hugged him and he kissed her.

“Couldn’t find my keys.”

“You’re home early.”

He grimaced. “Problems with the negotiations this morning. They were postponed till tomorrow. Thought I’d come home and do some work here.”

Jeanne’s other daughter, Lucy, eight, ran into the hallway. “Tommy! Can we watch
Judge Judy
?”

“Not today.”

“Aw, please. What’s in the bag?”

“That’s the work I have to do. And I need your help.” He set the bag down on the floor in the hallway, looked at the girls solemnly and said, “You ready?”

“I’m ready!” Lucy said.

Brit, the older girl, said nothing but that was because it wouldn’t be cool to agree with her sister; she was definitely ready to help too.

“After we postponed my meeting I went out and bought these. I’ve been reading up on it all morning.” Thompson reached into the shopping bag and pulled out cans of paint, sponges, rollers and brushes. Then he held up a book bristling with yellow Post-it tabs,
Home Decor Made Easy. Volume 3: Decorating Your Child’s Room.

“Tommy!” Britney said. “For our rooms?”

“Yep,” he drawled. “Your mom and I sure don’t want Dumbo on our walls.”

“You’re going to paint
Dumbo
?” Lucy frowned. “I don’t want Dumbo.”

Neither did Britney.

“I’ll paint whoever y’all want.”

“Let me look first!” Lucy took the book from him.

“No, me!”

“We’ll all look together,” Thompson said. “Let me hang up my coat and put my briefcase away.” He headed into his office, in the front of the house.

And returning to the kitchen, Jeanne Starke thought that despite his incessant travel, the paranoia about his job, the fact that his heart didn’t join into either his joy or his sadness, the fact that he wasn’t much of a lover, well, she knew she could do a lot worse in the boyfriend department.

*   *   *

Escaping down the alley from the police at the Langston Hughes school yard, Jax had piled into a cab and told the driver to head south, fast, ten bucks extra you roll through that light. Then five minutes later he’d told the man to circle back, dropping him off not far from the school.

He’d been lucky, getting away. The police were obviously going to do whatever was necessary to keep people from getting close to the girl. He was uneasy; it was almost like they’d known about him. Had that asshole claimer Ralph dimed him, after all?

Well, Jax’d have to be smarter. Which is what he was trying to do right now. Just like in prison—never
make your move until you’d checked everything out.

And he knew where to look for help.

City men always gravitated together, whether they were young or old, black or Hispanic or white, lived in East New York or Bay Ridge or Astoria. In Harlem they’d gather in churches, bars, rap and jazz clubs and coffee shops, living rooms, on park benches and doorsteps. They’d be on front stairs and fire escapes in the summer, around burning trash drums in the winter. Barbershops too—just like the movie from a few years ago (Jax’s real first name, Alonzo, in fact, had come from Alonzo Henderson, the former Georgia slave who became a millionaire by creating a popular chain of barbershops—a man whose drive and talent Jax’s father had hoped would rub off on the boy, vainly, as it turned out).

But the most popular place for men to congregate in Harlem was on basketball courts.

They’d go there to play ball, sure. But they’d also go just to bullshit, to solve the world’s problems, to speak of women fine and women mean, to argue sports, to dis, and to boast—in a modern, freewheeling version of signifying and toasting: the traditional art of telling the tales of mythical characters in black culture, like the criminal Stackolee or the stoker on the
Titanic
who survived the ice disaster by swimming to safety.

Jax now found the closest park to Langston Hughes with basketball courts. Despite the chill autumn air and low sun, they were plenty crowded. He eased up to the nearest one and took off his combat jacket, which the cops had probably tipped to, turned it inside out and slung it over his arm. He leaned against the chain link, smoking and looking like a big version of Pharaoh Ralph. He pulled off
the do-rag and brushed his ’fro up with his fingers.

Just as well he changed his look. He saw a squad car drive past, slow, along the street across from the playground. Jax stayed right where he was. Nothing draws cops faster than walking away (he’d been stopped dozens of times for the criminal offense of WWB—walking while black). At the court in front of him a handful of high school boys moved magically over the scuffed gray asphalt of a half court, while another dozen watched. Jax saw the dusty brown ball smack into the ground, then heard the delayed crack. He watched hands grapple, watched bodies collide, watched the ball sailing toward the board.

The squad car vanished and Jax pushed away from the fence and approached the boys standing on the edge of the court. The ex-con looked them over. Not a posse, no Glock-toting gangstas. Just a bunch of boys—some with tats, some without, some draped with chain, some with a single cross, some with bad intentions, some with good. Preening for the girls, lording over the little kids. Talking, smoking. Being young.

Watching them, Jax slipped into melancholy. He’d always wanted a big family but, like so many other things, that dream hadn’t worked out. He’d lost one child to the foster system and another to his girlfriend’s fateful visit to the clinic on 125th Street. One January years ago, to Jax’s delight, she’d announced she was pregnant. In March she’d had some pains and they’d gone to a free clinic, which was their only health care option. They’d spent hours in the filthy, overcrowded waiting room. By the time she’d finally gotten to see a doctor she’d miscarried.

Jax had grabbed the man and come close to beating him bloody. “Not my fault,” said the tiny Indian,
cowering beside a gurney. “They cut our budget. The city did, I’m saying.” Jax was plunged into rage and depression. He
had
to get even with somebody, to make sure this didn’t happen again—to her or to anyone else. It was no consolation when the doctor explained that at least they’d saved his girlfriend’s life—which probably wouldn’t’ve happened if other planned budget cutbacks for healthcare to the poor had gone through.

How could a fucking government do that to people? Wasn’t the whole point of city hall and the state capital to be there for the welfare of citizens? How could they let a little baby die?

Neither the doctor, nor the police who led him out of the hospital that night in handcuffs, had been inclined to answer those questions.

The sorrow and blistering anger at that memory made him all the more determined to get over with what he was about now.

Grim-faced, Jax looked over the boys on the courts and nodded to the one that he’d pegged as a leader of some kind. Wearing baggy shorts, high-top sneakers and a sports jersey. His hair was a gumby—thin on one side, rounded high on the other. The boy looked him over. “S’up, grandpa?”

Some guffaws from the others.

Grandpa.

In the old Harlem—well, maybe the old everywhere—being an adult carried respect. Now it got you dissed. A playa would’ve taken the piece out of his sock and make this little claimer hop to. But Jax had been seasoned by his years on the street and years inside prison and knew that wasn’t the way to go, not here. He laughed it off. Then whispered, “Tall paper?”

“You want some?”

“I wanta give
you
some. If you’re interested, asshole.” Jax tapped his pocket, where his wad of benjamins resided, curled up fat.

“I ain’t selling nothing.”

“And I ain’t buying what you think. Come on. Let’s stroll.”

The kid nodded and they walked away from the court. As they did, Jax felt the boy looking him over, noticing the man’s limp. Yeah, it was an I-got-shot limp but it
could’ve
been a playa-gangsta limp just as easy. And then he looked at Jax’s eyes, cold as dirt, and then the muscles and the prison tat. Maybe thinking: Jax’s age would’ve made him head-high O.G.—who you fucked with at your peril. Original Gangstas had AKs and Uzis and Hummers and a dozen badasses in their posses. O.G.s were the ones used twelve-year-olds to cap witnesses and rival dealers ’cause courts couldn’t send them into the system forever, like they did when you were seventeen or eighteen.

An O.G. would bust you up bad for calling him “grandpa.”

The kid started to look uneasy. “Yo, yo, whatchu want exactly, man? Where we goin’?”

“Just over there. Don’t want to talk in front of the whole world.” Jax stopped behind some bushes. The boy’s eyes darted around. Jax laughed. “I’m not going to fuck you up, boy. Chill.”

The kid laughed too. But nervous. “I’m down, man.”

“I need to find somebody’s crib. Somebody going to Langston Hughes. You go there?”

“Yeah, most of us.” He nodded toward the courts.

“I’m looking for the girl was on the news this morning.”

“Her? Geneva? Saw some dude get capped or something? The straight-A bitch?”

“I don’t know. She get straight A’s?”

“Yeah. She smart.”

“Where’s she live?”

He fell silent, cautious. Debating. Was he going to get fucked up for asking what he wanted to? He decided he wasn’t. “You were talking ’bout paper?”

Jax slipped him some bills.

“I myself don’ know the bitch, man. But I can hook you up with a brother who does. Nigger of mine name of Kevin. Want me to give him a call?”

“Yeah.”

A tiny cell phone emerged from the boy’s shorts. “Yo, dog. It’s Willy . . . . The half courts . . . Yeah. Listen, dude here with some benjamins, looking fo’ yo’ bitch . . . . Geneva. The Settle bitch . . . Hey, chill, man. S’a joke, you know what I’m saying? . . . Right. Now, this dude, he—”

Jax snatched the phone from Willy’s hand and said, “Two hundred, you give up her address.”

A hesitation.

“Cash?” Kevin asked.

“No,” Jax snapped, “American Fuckin’ Express. Yeah, cash.”

“I’ma come by the courts. You got those C-notes on you?”

“Yeah, they’re sitting right next to my Colt, you’re interested. And when I say Colt I don’t mean malt in a forty.”

“I’m down, man. Just askin’. I don’t go round fielding folk.”

“I’ll be hanging with my
crew,
” Jax said, grinning at the uneasy Willy. He disconnected the phone and tossed it to the kid. Then he walked back to the fence and leaned against it and watched the game.

Ten minutes later Kevin arrived—unlike Willy, he was a
real
playa, tall, handsome, poised. Looked like some actor Jax couldn’t place. To show off for the old dude, show he wasn’t too eager to earn any C-notes—and to impress a few of the bling girls, of course—Kevin took his time. Paused, tapped fists, hugged a boy or two. Tossed out, “Yo, yo, my man,” a few times and then stepped onto the court, commandeered the ball and did a couple of impressive dunks.

Man could play hoops, no question.

Finally Kevin loped up to Jax and looked him over, because that was what you did when an outsider walked into a pack—whether it was on half courts or in a bar or even in Alonzo Henderson’s Victorian-era barbershops, Jax guessed. Kevin tried to figure out where Jax was carrying the piece, how much paper he really had on him, what he was about. Jax asked, “Just lemme know how long you’re going keep giving me the bad-eye, okay? ’Cause it’s gettin’ boring.”

Kevin didn’t smile. “Where’s the benjamins?”

Jax slipped Kevin the money.

“Where’s the girl?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

“Just the address.”

“You afraid of me?”

“Just the address.” Eyes not wavering.

Kevin grinned. “Don’t know the number, man. I know the building. I walked her home last spring. I gotta point it out.”

Jax nodded.

They started west and south, surprising Jax; he thought the girl would live in one of the tougher neighborhoods—farther north toward the Harlem River, or east. The streets here weren’t elegant but
they were clean, and many of the buildings had been renovated, it seemed. There was also a lot of new construction underway.

Jax frowned, looking around at the nice streets. “You sure we’re talking Geneva Settle.”

“That’s the bitch you ask about. That’s the crib I’m showing you . . . . Yo, man, you wanta buy some weed, some rock?”

“No.”

“Sure? I got some good shit.”

“A damn shame, you going deaf and all at your young age.”

Kevin shrugged.

They came to a block near Morningside Park. On top of the rocky incline was the Columbia University campus, a place he had frequently bombed with
Jax 157
years ago.