Clockers (15 page)

“Yeah, grow something new up there.” Thumper made a frame with his hands. ”
‘Hump
head,’” he said, rapping the kid on his unprotected abdomen. “What do you think of ‘Humphead’?”

Rocco looked around the room, then down at the kid’s sneakers. “You ready to fight tonight?”

The kid blinked open-mouthed now, uncomprehending. Rocco gestured toward a 250-pound trustie across the room who was pumpkin-headed, bald and wearing a nylon stocking over his scalp. Tilting his chair back against the wall, a milk carton in his lap, the convict pointed at the BKs and then tapped his own chest.

Rocco guffawed at him. “Two small for
your
fat fuckin’ boats.”

“I’ll stretch them.” He shrugged, then took in Touhey, locking eyes with him across the room. “I can fit into
any
thing if I stretch it out first.”

Touhey became so disoriented that he started to turn in circles, blinking, his elbow pressing his shoulder bag into his ribs. Rocco watched him turning on a spit, soft white underbelly head to toe, thinking once again, Why the hell would anybody dip themselves in shit like this voluntarily?

Mazilli came back to them from the processing desk accompanied by a correction officer, who ushered Maldonado into a living room-size cement-floor bullpen to await the next morning’s arraignment. He was issued a pallet to sleep on and locked up with twenty other all-nighters. The bullpen’s walls were covered with graffiti, a thousand predictable messages, all seeming to center around the words “fuck” and “AIDS.”

As they turned to leave the jail, Touhey almost took Rocco’s arm, trying to avoid looking at everything and everybody, stumbling along like a half-blind old man crossing a rush-hour highway on foot. Rocco felt bad for him, wondered if he overestimated what the actor could handle. He decided to give him something to make up for it, a little treat. “Sean, I want to show you something.”

“What?” The actor answered too quickly.

“Come here.” Rocco guided him over to the bars of the bullpen, Maldonado already receding into the anonymity of the room, already out of Rocco’s mind. “Look where I’m pointing.”

Touhey seemed to have a hard time focusing past the blank stares of that night’s haul. Most of the prisoners were right up in his face, gripping the bars.

Rocco nudged the actor. “There on the wall.”

The naked overhead light bleached out a lot of the detailing, but Rocco could still make out the rainbow someone had drawn. At least six bands of color arched through clouds and birds and valleys, a loving and lush pulp-art vision completely devoid of sexual challenge.

“That fucking thing has been on that wall for as long as I can remember,” Rocco said, “and nobody’s ever drawn over it. You think of all the animals and mutants thrown in here over the years, day in, day out, everybody writing Fuck You, Kiss My Ass, floor to ceiling, and yet nobody ever drew over that. So what does that mean? What does that say to you?”

Touhey was looking at his shoes, trying to become invisible. “I don’t know.”

Rocco was about to hold forth about the human spirit but decided to let it go; either you got it or you didn’t. “Well, think about it there, Sean.”

“I will, I will,” the actor said, blurting it out with a tense and clammy abruptness that made Rocco realize that he might be torturing the guy in a way that would never be forgiven.

“Good.” Rocco found himself scanning walls and faces, searching for something else to give the actor, some gift, some glue that would make him stay.

Rocco sat with Mazilli and Touhey in the Camelot, a gaudy Italian restaurant with a lobster tank, white tablecloths and six-page tablet menus, but also with blinding overheads, drinks that came in short skinny glasses with straws and a loud TV behind the bar. The Camelot was on the DMZ between the Heights and the last vestiges of old-time German-Irish Dempsy, and cops were always welcome. If you were Dempsy P.D., no matter how much you ate or drank the bill would never climb over twenty-four dollars a table. A few cops even took turns moonlighting here, picking up and driving home the elderly white Catholic regulars, chauffeuring them in a fifteen-year-old limo that the owner kept parked right out front by a fire hydrant night and day.

Rocco took a sip of his vodka and cranberry juice; it was too sweet, like Hawaiian Punch. He felt a thickness in his blood, anxious for something to happen, for somebody to kill somebody, for the beeper on his hip to go off before Touhey faded on them again and started thinking about hanging out with Narcotics, Emergency Services or, God forbid, firemen. Well shit, they weren’t New York with its two thousand homicides a year. They pulled in sixty, seventy, most of them grounders, somebody doing his wife or his best friend, the occasional fag stabbing, although the solve rate was slipping a little, the violence getting more random and impersonal given all the crack and base coke out there these days. In Dempsy, the Homicide four-to-twelve was mainly this! drinks, staring at an oversize menu wondering what to eat, watching videos or news on TV back in the office, waiting for the phones to ring or the pagers to beep.

Touhey sat with his elbows on the table, a hand over his mouth, looking pensive. His club soda with lime was untouched. Next to Rocco, Mazilli hunched over his scotch, sucking it through a straw, his hands buried under his arms.

Touhey’s eyes found Rocco’s. “I think I finally see what you mean about the rainbow.”

“Yeah? Good.”

“What rainbow?” Mazilli sounded as if he was gargling, trolling the bottom of his glass with the straw.

“You ever see that rainbow in the bullpen?”

“No.”

Rocco smiled at Touhey. “If you can’t eat it, fuck it or sell it something, Mazilli goes south.”

“What do you think will happen to Maldonado tonight?” Touhey looked worried.

“What’ll happen?” Mazilli waved for another scotch. “That big fucking b.o.-smelling shit-on-his-dick gorilla you saw? He’s gonna put his arm around him like this”—Mazilli grabbed Rocco in a light open-ended headlock—“and then he’s gonna take them big licorice lips and plant one right on the side of his face like this”—Mazilli put his hand like a starfish on Rocco’s head from temple to chin and made a loud sucking noise ending in a pop—“suck out his fucking eyeball and say, ‘You
mine,
Nelthun.’
That’s
what’s gonna happen to Maldonado tonight.”

Touhey stared at Mazilli.

“Can you believe this guy’s acting head of Homicide for the next two weeks?” Rocco chucked a thumb at Mazilli, trying to lighten the moment.

“How come you don’t ask about Henderson?” Mazilli squinted at the actor. “You see the photos of Henderson with the eyeballs? How come you don’t ask about
him?
Or his
kids?
Or his
wife?
”

“Maz, ease up,” Rocco said.

“No, hey, alls I’m saying is, this guy, you…” He pointed at Touhey. “I mean, you’re probably a good soul and all, you want to help people, you care, like ‘Here I am, what hurts?’ Right? Right?” He waited until Touhey shrugged in tentative agreement. “Yeah? Well this is what I have to say to you. You don’t know shit. The lines are drawn. Whites and blacks? For the most part? They were never meant to be together. You know why Henderson got killed? He showed
fear.
”

“Well, OK, but…” Touhey sounded rattled. “He hit a four-year-old kid, no?”

”
He … showed … fear.
“ Mazilli blared it out. “White people show
fear,
white people
smile,
white people say
please
and
thank
you. To the whites, all that’s decency, OK? It’s just being human. But to the blacks? The Spanish? You know, not
all
of them but the ones on the bottom? They’re all signs of weakness. It’s like throwing chum in the water and that’s the way it is.”

The waitress slid a scotch in front of Mazilli. He grabbed her hand. “Am I right or am I right?”

The waitress, a thirty-year veteran of the Camelot, shrugged. “Last time I voted? It was for John Kennedy.”

Rocco was hesitant to look at Touhey, but when he did he was surprised to see that the actor looked entranced, as if he had just discovered something amazing.

“‘What’s gonna happen to Maldonado…’” Mazilli muttered. “You interested in the downtrodden? Their plight? Let me tell you something. Before you get
down
with them, you better start thinking like them and acting like them, because they’re
never
gonna think and act like
you,
and you’re gonna wind up like Henderson there, with your eyeballs buggin’ out.”

The waitress stood over them, ruffling her pad. “You boys ready to order?”

“Hey, I’m not signing up to do social work, I was just asking.” Touhey seemed calmer now, almost laughing.

“Yeah, well, I was just answering.” Mazilli went nose down into his menu, his upper body knotted with anger.

Rocco tried to draw Touhey off. give him a signal to take his partner with a grain of salt, but the actor only had eyes for Mazilli.

Suddenly Mazilli unclenched his shoulders and sighed into his menu. “Look, I’m not saying the whites are all that great, but it’s like, if we’re maybe only five steps
out
of the jungle, they’re still five steps
in.
“ Twisting his head and looking up to the waitress, he said, “I’ll have the veal parmigian and a house salad.”

She nodded at Touhey as if she disapproved of him for getting Mazilli upset. “You?”

“I feel like having something light.”

“How ‘bout a bowl of feathers,” Mazilli drawled.

Touhey horse-laughed, and Rocco couldn’t tell if it was tension or a growing affection for Mazilli. Either way, Rocco wanted to come up with a good one, something to show the actor he could hold his own here.

Touhey asked for a double order of house salad, dressing on the side. When the waitress turned to Rocco, he was so distracted he just raised his half-full drink to signal for a refill. He turned to the actor and smiled. “So, Sean, what’s the story of this movie—you know, the plot?”

“Huh?” Touhey grunted blankly. “We’re working on it.”

“So what do you have, like a concept?” Concept: Rocco felt as if he was on a bad blind date trying to make some conversation.

Touhey didn’t bother to answer. He turned back to Mazilli, hunching down, drawing a bead. “I’m going to give you a concept, you give me a reaction, OK?”

Mazilli shrugged and lit a cigarette.

“Rehabilitation,” Touhey said.

“What is this, ‘Password’?” Mazilli tossed his match on the tablecloth. “You want to know what
I
believe in? I believe in punishment, I believe in fear, and I believe in
revenge.”

Lips moving silently, Touhey cocked his head and peered at Mazilli as if trying to memorize him.

Rocco sighed, announcing to himself, My turn. “Yeah, well. You say rehabilitation. You know, we’re human, I mean most of us, and nobody starts out hard. I come on the job twenty years ago? I wanted to be a cop. Why, to beat up the minorities? No. I wanted to help people. Somebody yells ‘Police,’ that’s me. I hit the ground running—white, black, yellow, whatever.”

Rocco sneaked a glance at Mazilli and was surprised to see that he wasn’t rolling his eyes.

“OK? But rehabilitation…” Rocco paused, drawing breath for the tale. “It’s like when I was in uniform. My first week I had a partner, Frog Phelan. Maz, you remember Frog?”

Mazilli shrugged.

“Frog Phelan, he came on the job when Truman was President. I’m like twenty-one, twenty-two, and we get a call. Lafayette Houses, there’s a kid screaming in an apartment, door’s locked. The elevator’s broke so Frog sends me up alone, he ain’t gonna jog up six stories, he’s blotto anyhow. I get up there, Housing’s just popped the lock. We go in, there’s a three-year-old kid handcuffed to a burning hot radiator, nobody else in the house. The handcuff’s metal, right? Metal conducts heat? I don’t know how long the kid was hooked up like that, but he had a ring of cooked flesh around his wrist, OK?”

Touhey looked as if he had turned to glass.

“We call the ambulance, cut the cuff, they take the kid to Christ the King. Housing leaves, but I just stay in the room by the radiator. Sit there on the windowsill. Sitting there forty fucking minutes, and finally in comes the mother. That’s forty more minutes the kid would have cooked if we didn’t get in, OK? She walks in, she’s fuckin’ got them half-mast heroin eyes, right? Went out to cop? She walks in, no kid there. She looks at me. I look at her. There’s like this moment, you know? All of a sudden she tears ass. I chase that fucking bitch down six flights of stairs. She makes it to the lobby, runs right into Phelan, he grabs her but here
I’m
coming like the avenging angel, ninety miles an hour. Frog throws his shoulder into me. Boom, I go right into the mailboxes. I’m looking at him like, What the fuck? He takes her out, gives her over to another cruiser, they take her in. He comes, gets me. We’re sitting in the car, he says to me, ‘Rocco, that lady you were gonna brain? Twenty years ago when she was a little girl I arrested her father for beating her baby brother to death. The father was a real piece of shit. Now that she’s all grown up?
She’s
a real piece of shit. That kid you saved tonight. If he lives that long, if he grows up?
He’s
gonna be a real piece of shit. Rocco,’ Frog says to me, ‘it’s the cycle of shit and you can’t do nothing about it. So take it easy and just do your job.’”

Touhey, all Rocco’s again, shook his head. “Wow … wow.”

“You have the same experiences over and over in this job,” Rocco said, feeling on solid ground now, “so when you say rehabilitation, Sean, what you find over the years is that it takes all your strength just to maintain the status quo out there.”

“The cycle of shit,” Mazilli announced, but Rocco couldn’t read his tone.

“So what happened to the kid?” Touhey asked.

Rocco had no idea what happened to the kid and was debating making something up when Mazilli chimed in: “He’s the fucking mayor of Dempsy, and last week he instituted across-the-board pay cuts for all city detectives.”