Clockers (12 page)

Strike parked the Accord in an all-night garage, slipped his gun behind his belt buckle and walked two blocks, past corner groceries, past rows of older men leaning on building walls, past teenage girls sitting on car fenders and teenage boys doing loud and jumpy things to get the girls’ attention. Her block was an ethnic stew—Puerto Rican, black, African black, even some Vietnamese—and Strike thought this was probably a good thing, since most people were not inclined to mess with anyone outside their own blood. He spotted dope traffic coming in and out of one building’s deep front courtyard, but they were coming off sneaky, slipping into shadows, so it could have been worse.

It felt strange walking around with the gun right after talking about actually shooting somebody. The small .25 had always seemed unreal to him, somewhere between a toy and a symbol, but right now, passing all these people, the piece seemed to be breathing up against his belly, growing teeth. Strike found himself wondering for the first time since he had left Rodney’s house if he really had it in him, either the coldness or the heat, to point the damn thing at someone’s head and pull the trigger.

Strike walked up to Crystal’s building, a beat-up 1920s beauty, white brick with rounded edges, also with a deep front courtyard, angular aluminum molding on the front door and half-moon door handles. He stepped into the wide lobby, with its spare Navaho floor design and its curdled green stucco walls under naked fluorescent bar lights, and headed for the elevator but then saw a white guy talking to a young Latino smeared head to toe with dried plaster. Reading “cop,” Strike veered toward the stairs, but the white guy called out, “Hey, you, wait a minute, wait a minute,” and stopped him dead in his tracks.

Strike had never seen this guy before, but he had a vague recollection of Crystal once telling him that the super here was a moonlighting cop, Ralphie or Malphie, and this had to be him. The guy was forty or so, sandy-haired, cowboy lean, wearing dungarees, construction boots and a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves, revealing on one forearm a tattoo of a scroll with a crossed-out name.

Once he had Strike nailed in place, the cop turned his back on him, put a hand on the elevator door and returned to his conversation with the Latino.

“So, wait, you didn’t know you were gonna have triplets?” His voice was languidly dense, as if he was a little slow on the uptake, but Strike knew that tone came from the man’s feeling of complete control. He had heard cops speak that way before.

The Latino kid was tall and thin. A corrugated-paper dust mask hung around his neck. He was too shy or embarrassed to answer, as if he had screwed up in some way.

“Didn’t she have that thing when she was pregnant? That test, you know, what’s it…”

“Yeah,” he murmured.

“So didn’t you hear three heartbeats?” The cop sounded casual and interrogatory at the same time.

The kid shrugged, blushing, dying to go back to work.

“Jesus,” the cop drawled, “what did the doctor say?”

“He thought it was a boy, a strong boy,” the kid said in a quick burst.

The lobby was silent. The cop chewed over this last comment while both the Latino and Strike fidgeted on either side of him. The cop stared at the kid, shaking his head. “Jesus. Fucking doctors, hah?”

Then, his back still to Strike, the cop slowly turned his head until his chin was almost touching his shoulder. He peered behind him at Strike now with an arched eyebrow, giving him the up-and-down.

“You hear this?”

Strike shrugged, said nothing.

“Unbelievable, right?”

The Latino took the opportunity to back away. “I talk to you later.” He started down the basement stairs.

“OK, Benny. Leave the garbage for tomorrow,” the cop said, then turned around to examine Strike. “Where
you
going?” he said, tilting his chin.

Strike hesitated, thinking how to answer that without giving him any information. “Six.”

“Six what?”

“Six C.”

“Six C? You going to see Crystal?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? What’s your name?”

“Dunham.”

“Dunham?” The cop had gray eyes, flashlight eyes. Strike tried to keep his hands away from his waistband.

“Yeah.”

“She’s a good lady, Crystal, right?”

Strike said nothing.

“I’m Malfie. I’m the super here.” His slow, chewy way of speaking was like torture.

Strike nodded, hoping to come off shy.

“You made me for a
cop
when you came in here, right?” His tight smile showed perfect teeth, meat teeth.

Strike mumbled something like no.

“Yeah,” Malfie growled through his grin, “that’s why you went for those stairs, right?”

“No.” Strike was running out of evasions, his gun glued to his gut with a band of sweat.

“No, hah? What are you, a health nut? You always walk up six flights with an elevator right here?”

“Elevator too slow,” Strike said, his voice small.

“Yeahhh.” Malfie almost groaned with satisfaction, showing those teeth again, square like wood. “You Crystal’s boyfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

Silence. And then Strike felt a blow of redness in his gut. He was desperate to touch it but resisted, the gun like a hot iron right over the pain.

“What’s a matter?” The chin pointed again, the gray eyes narrowed.

“Nothin’.”

“You look like you got an ulcer attack.”

“Naw.”

“You have an ulcer?”

“Naw.” Strike waited a respectful beat, then asked, “Can I go?” He was vaguely furious at having to get permission from this moonlighting motherfucker for next to no reason. This wasn’t even Strike’s goddamn
state,
but the cop just assumed he had the natural authority. But Strike assumed the cop had it too.

“Can I go?” He put a little more juice into it this time.

The cop ignored the question. “I want to ask you something. Can I ask you something?”

“What?” Strike tried to stand up straight, the anger cutting down on the pain a little.

“I had this job out in Brooklyn last night? I get there with my partner, we got a guy in a basement, he was dead maybe five days. You’d think somebody would have smelled it, right?”

The cop waited for Strike’s answer just like Thumper would, aping Strike’s head movements, tracking him with his eyes. Strike murmured, “Yeah.”

“Yeah, I would too. Anyways, we get there. The guy was laying there, we thought he was still moving a little like maybe he was alive, right? Nah, it was the maggots under his clothes. It looked like he was crawling, you know? Anyways … oh, Jesus. Maggots. Blowflies. You ever see blowflies around a dead body? Those black flies?”

Strike quickly said no to get him going to the end.

“Anyways, we’re there to make a determination, right? Homicide, suicide, accident, but the needle’s still hanging out his arm, so, you know, it’s an overdose. But anyways, we’re there and all of a sudden,
zing,
I get bit”—Malfie slapped the side of his neck—“by a fuckin’ blowfly, see?” He tilted his head to expose his jugular. “I slapped it, right? The thing popped and it was full of blood. So I’m thinking, I got bit by this fucking blowfly filled up with this dead junkie’s blood, so…” He studied Strike eye-to-eye. “What do you think, should I get an AIDS test?”

“I don’t know.” Strike stared at Maine’s chapped construction boots, the anger totally replacing the gut ache. Yeah, he could kill Darryl Adams. Easy.

“You don’t know? What kind of answer is that?”

“I don’t know.” He forced himself to look Malfie in the eye. “I got to go, OK?”

Malfie shrugged. “So you’re Crystal’s boyfriend?”

“Yeah,” Strike muttered, almost losing it, unable to keep the heat from his voice.

“She’s a good lady, Crystal.”

“Yeah. She a nice person.” He curbed the rage into a neutral tone again. “Can I see her now?”

Malfie sighed, then yawned, bringing clasped hands high over his head in a one-eyed stretch. “Tell her Malfie says hello.”

He opened the elevator door for Strike to enter, but when Strike stepped forward he closed it in his face.

“Sorry, I forgot.” The cop nodded toward the stairs. “The elevator’s too slow for you, right?”

Using his key, Strike opened the door and looked through the arched entranceway to the sunken living room. Crystal sat curled up on the couch, hugging herself in a cheap-looking pink bathrobe. She was watching David Letterman on the big TV: James Brown was slip-sliding across the stage in front of the interview chairs and screeching like a cat. The TV was on so loud that she didn’t even know Strike was there. Already in a twisted head, Strike hissed in distaste at the pile of light blue plastic dishes sitting unwashed in the sink. A piece of dirty masking tape ran across a tear in one of the vinyl-covered kitchen chairs, and Strike saw that the ironing board still stood out in the living room, as if she had decided to consider it furniture after all these weeks.

Crystal’s chubby six-year-old son, José, came running down the hallway. Behind him Strike could make out a Yogi Bear video on a smaller TV in his bedroom. The kid stopped short on seeing him, looking a little tense—he didn’t like Strike, but the feeling was mutual and so not Strike’s problem. Then he veered sharply into the living room and fell onto his mother’s midriff, and Crystal jerked up into a jackknife. The boy held her face in his hands and whispered into her eyes.

Strike was angry at this too: twelve-thirty at night, the damn kid up watching TV. Plus, where’d the TV come from? There was no damn TV in his room last time, not a VCR either.

Crystal turned her head in surprise, her narrow harlequin glasses accentuating her broad cheekbones. “Jesus,
knock
or something. How long you been here?” She smoothed out the couch on either side of her, and José jumped up, barreled out of the living room past Strike and back down the hallway to his bedroom.

“You should tell me sometime, you know, ‘cause all I got in the house is dry cereal and coffee now.” She spoke to him in a softly reproachful tone. Strike saw a roach on the wall space between the dish rack and the bottom of the cabinet and quickly looked away. Sighing, he moved to the refrigerator and took out a vanilla Yoo-Hoo, one he had stashed way in back, rolling it between his palms to take out the chill.

Crystal shuffled into the kitchen, her hand closing her robe over her legs. She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You OK?”

The concern in her voice caught him up short: he thought he had put a cork in his anger on his way up the stairs. Actually, since coming in here, the TV, the dirty dishes and the wide-awake kid had all become problems that were more real to him than the run-in downstairs. Sometimes he found it impossible to keep straight what exactly it was that was pissing him off from day to day, hour to hour.

“That cop—you know, the super?” Strike coughed, twisted off the top of the Yoo-Hoo, took a long swig. “Yeah, I never met him.”

“Malfie? Yeah, Malfie can be a teaser sometime.” Crystal’s voice sounded a little too light to Strike’s ear.

Strike blew air out his mouth, felt the sweetness creep like a sheet down his guts. “A teaser,” Strike repeated. Teasing: is that what it was? He took out his gun, and for a second Crystal’s face went statue-blank. But Strike just walked over to the Formica hutch in a corner of the living room, its shelves holding mainly junk—painted dishes, bobble-head dolls—and laid the gun behind a loving cup on the top shelf.

“Malfie, he’s a good guy, you know?” Crystal rubbed her nose, her eyes wide as if she was afraid to blink. “I didn’t pay my rent for three months because the landlord didn’t paint the apartment like he promised last year? But like, when he did I had to come up with thirteen hundred and fifty-five dollars back rent and I was freaking out on that, and Malfie came up to put the child guards on the windows? I told him about it and he just said I should forget it.

He said the landlord never looks at the books, he’s got like six other buildings in better neighborhoods so I shouldn’t worry about it. He even gave me a phony rent receipt in case, you know…” She began braiding her fingers.

Strike stood in front of the wall unit, looking at all her crap. There was a white ceramic dinner bell with a gondola painted on it, a large scalloped bowl filled with matchbooks. How come she was talking so fast?

Strike was about to say, “Oh yeah? And what did you do for him?” when José bellowed “Mommy!” from his bedroom and Crystal flew out of the living room, leaving Strike glaring at her trinkets, feeling the sweat cool behind his belt where his gun had been.

Strike wandered down the hall after her and stood in the bedroom doorway as she and José began arguing about bedtime, she clicking off the TV, he clicking it back on, back and forth like a comedy, the kid bellowing, “You promised,” Crystal yelling, “I said one more,
one!
“ Then the kid did a back flip of despair onto his bunk bed and whacked his head on the side of the top bunk by accident, probably not hurting that much but fresh fuel for more sobs. The kid slept alone in this room, but Crystal got the bunk bed in there because it was free, offered to her by a neighbor.

As José thrashed on his back, both hands to his temples, inconsolably aggrieved, chanting, “You promised, you promised,” Strike scanned the array of photographs on José‘s dresser and desk: José in a kindergarten cap and gown, with his grandparents in Ponce, on Santa’s lap, with his jailbird father in front of the apartment house.

Crystal stood over José, letting the storm pass. She turned to Strike: “It’s almost one o’clock and he got school tomorrow. Am I wrong?”

The kid sat up, his little barrel chest rising high against his collarbone. Wringing his hands, he looked like a tormented dwarf. “What does a promise mean, Mommy, what does a promise mean?”

“Turn out the lights,” Crystal said. “I’ll bring you a Coca-Cola.”

She brushed past Strike on her way to the kitchen. Strike thought she smelled like lamb chops. It was a close and heavy smell that made it hard for him to breathe.

Alone with the kid now, Strike avoided his eyes. He took in the bedroom window, gridlocked with bars and rails to keep José in and the crackheads out, stared up at a plate-size paint flake hanging from the ceiling—
real
hard to breathe.