Clockers (19 page)

“Dempsy burnin’.” Rocco slid into the front seat, throwing Touhey a fast wink: showtime.

“Likely to die? Maybe we can have a little nourishment here?” Mazilli pressed his palms together, praying to the steering wheel. If the heart was still beating, no matter how imminent the death, the Homicide squad was officially on hold.

“Sorry.” Rocco couldn’t help smiling. “Out of the picture.”

“In the hospital?” Mazilli begged.

“Body on the scene.”

Rocco saw that Touhey understood
that
at least, the actor getting happy eyes that he couldn’t mask.

“Indoors?” Mazilli chewed his thumb. “No, fucking outdoors, right? Outdoors in the jungle, right?”

Rocco dragged out the guessing game. “Well, it’s kind of indoors and outdoors.”

“What, doubleheader?”

“No, but the guy’s laying in the doorway of a restaurant, half in, half out.”

“Beautiful.” Mazilli sighed, turning on the ignition again. “What are you calling a restaurant? McDonald’s? Hambone’s? Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

“Close. Ahab’s on De Groot.”

“Ahab’s.” Mazilli muttered something inarticulate, then tilted his head toward the back seat. “You have an Ahab’s where you live?”

Touhey blinked and shrugged.

“Deep-fried
fish
assholes. You should try one.”

Riding across town to his first murder, Touhey acted like a kid, bobbing up and down on the rear seat, elbows between the front headrests.

“It’s amazing,” he chattered, “if you think about it. That pager, it’s a pipeline to the belly of the beast. Every time that thing beeps, it means the beast chewed up another one. It’s like having your finger on the rage pulse of an entire city, you know what I mean? You can actually monitor the homicidal rage of a city on your hip. It’s a
rage
meter, that beeper.”

Rocco, relieved that the actor was in a good mood, smiled at him. “I never thought of it that way.”

“De
rage
meter,” Mazilli said dryly, an announcement to no one, then started to sing, “‘Beep-beep, beep-beep, the horn went beep-beep-beep.’ You remember that song? ‘While riding in my Cadi-
lac,
much to my sur-
prise
…’ You ever meet them? The guys who sang that?” Mazilli looked in the rearview mirror.

“I never heard it before,” Touhey said.

“You never heard it? How about, ‘Who Hit Annie in the Fannie with a Flounder’? You ever hear that?”

The Lemon Tree Restaurant was in the town of Rydell, twenty minutes from the scene, and the drive took them from white working-class aluminum siding to black housing projects to JFK Boulevard. JFK was two miles of funk: storefront churches, deserted lots, hair salons and private day-care centers. Most of the store signs were hand drawn—lots of reds and light blues, crudely rendered heads and faces painted on cinder block or plywood, long-winded church names, blinking yellow chase lights over the combination smoke shop/video rental/candy stores, cameras mounted on every other telephone pole to monitor drug transactions. There were enough people on the streets just standing around to make Rocco feel as if a parade would turn the corner any minute.

“This looks like Central America,” Touhey said happily.

“When I was a kid?” Rocco arched up, shifted his gun slightly off his hipbone. “This was Frawley Avenue. You could walk down the street naked, middle of the night. It was a pleasure.”

“How come you guys are stopping for all the red lights?” Touhey started bouncing on the edge of his seat again.

“Well, how do
you
drive?” Mazilli looked in the rearview again.

“Yeah, but there’s a murder, right?”

“The guy’s
dead.
”

Mazilli pulled the car over about two blocks from the scene. From here Rocco could see the municipal block party shaping up: a half-dozen green and yellow cruisers slant-parked in the Ahab’s lot, along with another half-dozen unmarked tan Plymouths and an ambulance, its beacon swinging out shafts of red in a lazy whirl. The herd was jumping, people running to and from the outer edge of the growing crowd, lots of yelling and laughing, and on the restaurant roof the plaster Ahab—complete with pegleg, Amish beard and harpoon—revolved thirty feet in the sky, one arm outstretched as if inviting one and all to view the body.

Mazilli threw the car in park, ran a hand over his mouth and sighed through his nose. Then he left the car and sauntered into Shaft Deli-Liquors, which was flanked by Keisha’s Hair Salon and the Thunderball Lounge.

“What’s he doing?” Touhey tried to keep the impatience out of his voice, but Rocco knew he was jumping out of his skin.

“Getting a few of those airplane bottles—you know, a little shnortsky before we get into the shit.” Rocco hoped Mazilli wouldn’t be a cheap bastard and grab a Smirnoff, with the Stoli sitting right next to it. “You didn’t want anything, did you? I didn’t even think to ask. You know, I saw you nursing that club soda there.”

“No.” Touhey drew his mouth down and nodded.

They both stared in silence at a life-size cardboard cutout of a black woman in a sequined dress slit up the side, fondling the tip of an ebony cue stick placed six inches above a pair of eight balls on a pool table. There was something orange and foamy in a brandy snifter held in her free hand.

“Well, what if someone in there sees him buying booze down the street from a murder? He’s the investigator of record, right?”

“Well, yeah.” Rocco shifted his gun off his hip again. “But he owns the store.”

When Mazilli came out a few minutes later, they left the car where it was and walked to the Scene. Rocco liked to come up on homicide crowds from the rear, weave his way up to the tape so he could overhear snatches of street speculation.

It was hard to drink straight out of the small-mouthed bottles but they managed, tossing the empties while they were still a block away. Rocco let Touhey carry the steel forensic case. He nudged the actor, tilting his chin to the sky.

“Anytime the moon’s full like that? Any cop with half a brain goes around with his safety off.”

“Get out.”

“Mazilli, am I lying?”

“Nope.” Mazilli was already working, noting people on high stoops, in lit windows and open stores, any hangout spot with a good view.

“Jails, mental wards, kennels, they all put out No Vacancy signs,” Rocco said.

“Come on,” Touhey burbled, a little trot in his step.

“The full moon is for real. It’s got enough magnetic power to affect the tides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, two of the biggest we have, OK? Meanwhile, the human
brain
is eighty percent fluid, you follow me?” Rocco mimed pouring from a pitcher into his ear, feeling more drunk than he wanted to be.

Touhey laughed. “So the full moon comes out, people walk around all night sloshing?” He tilted his head from shoulder to shoulder. “Low tide, high tide, low tide?”

“Hey, I’m no scientist. I just…” Rocco sidled into the rear of the herd, standing on tiptoes, craning his neck, going to work.

“What the fuck happened?” he said out loud to no one.

“That ol’ boy got shot
up,
“ drawled a teenager without turning around.

“Yeah? Who shot him?”

The kid turned and gave Rocco the once-over, smirking.

Rocco decided to push it a little. “He was a nice guy, right? Who the hell would want to shoot
him?
”

“I wouldn’t know.” The kid was watching the local detectives take down the license plate numbers on the few cars still parked in the lot.

“Got any ideas?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to cast out no false criticisms per
se,
you know?”

Rocco laughed. “Hey, I wouldn’t want you to.” He slipped the kid his card, down low at hip level, then moved on through, Touhey almost stepping on his heels.

The crowd was held at bay by a thirty-foot-long crime scene tape. Rocco duckwalked under the fluttering yellow strip, then held it high for the actor. He caught a quick glimpse of Mazilli walking away from the action, heading off with one of his street connections, the two of them trudging uphill, carefully avoiding the glaring cones of streetlights that marked their path. From experience, Rocco knew that in roughly a half hour Mazilli would return with either everything or nothing.

Entering the DMZ that was the Ahab’s parking lot was like walking on stage, both Rocco and Touhey getting what was known as the Dempsy Stare from some of the young bloods: a furrow-browed, open-mouthed, swivel-headed look of defiance that followed every cop who worked JFK Boulevard or the housing projects or in any poor section of the city.

Rocco turned to size up the crowd across the tape, feeling as if he was inside a movie screen, looking out at the audience. He grinned at the actor. “You want to throw ‘em some
Sweet Bird of Youth?
”

“What?” Touhey blinked, starting to look shaky now.

“My public,” Rocco said, enjoying his own quip. He was content to hang back near the crowd for a few minutes more, soaking up fragments of conversation, scanning faces beyond the tape, but then he found himself in an eyelock with one kid who stared back from under a Rock of Gibraltar sculpted fade with an orange tint. Rocco’s gaze went from the kid’s eyes to his hair and back to his stare; the kid was not so much defiant as unintimidated.

Hands in pockets, Rocco absently belly-bumped the tape as he nodded to the kid. “What’s up, Money?”

The kid shrugged, curling his hands under his perforated blue-and-orange Mets jersey, exposing his fiat belly. The blue hem of his boxer shorts was two inches higher than the waist of his gray acid-washed jeans. “Nah, you know, nothin’.” The kid smiled, apparently enjoying the idea of bullshitting with a Homicide.

“Nothin’?”

“What, they kill the manager in there?” The kid tilted his head toward the building.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

The kid shrugged again, an arm disappearing up to the elbow inside his shirt, caressing his chest. “Nah, you know.”

”
You
do it?”

“Me? Nah, man. I go to school.”

“Oh yeah?” Rocco grinned with delight: Dempsy logic.

“I don’t even
like
that place.”

“You don’t like the crab legs? I thought you guys lived off crab legs.”

“Crab legs cost
money
”

Two of the kid’s friends rolled by, hanging all over him, staring at Rocco, intrigued.

“How ‘bout you guys, you like crab legs?”

They continued to stare without speaking.

“How about Golden Mobies?”

Ignoring Rocco, one of the new kids zeroed in on Touhey, who was standing ten feet back, the steel case between his ankles, trying hard to look casual. “That ain’t no cop. That nigger look
scared
”

Rocco waggled a finger at the kid, a laid-back warning, and then, as much to remove Touhey from the curious and vaguely hostile stares as to actually get down to work, he finally turned to the darkened restaurant.

The body lay in the side entrance, surrounded by yet another ring of ribbon, the spotlit plaster Ahab revolving over the corpse like an amusement-park angel of death, the grinding of its motor audible in the stillness of the inner circle.

Rocco held up the second tape for Touhey. The body lay at their feet now, covered except for a pair of snow-white Filas sticking out from under a white sheet, heels down, the ankles crossed as if death was just another way of taking it easy. An arm peeked out from the sheet, the wrist cocked back languidly so that the hand, palm up, was slightly raised off the ground, resting on its knuckles. Blotches of red still bloomed at the head, blood seeping out from the top border of the sheet, carrying along bits of brain matter like a floating scatter of baby teeth and encircling a purple and white University of Maryland cap.

The sheet annoyed Rocco: it was a contaminant. He could understand if the local squad had been worried about crowd control, the herd getting all jacked up by the sight of blood, but they should have just parked a car nearby to block the view. Now, if he got some of the shooter’s hairs off the victim, any semiconscious defense lawyer would claim they came from the sheet, not the body. Rocco started brooding about the possible trial: reasonable doubt can be a real ass-kicker sometimes.

“Hey Rocco.”

Rocco turned to the wheezing voice. “Heyyy…” He shook hands with Vince Kelso, a precinct detective who’d married Thumper’s older sister, Rocco’s ex-high school sweetheart. Kelso weighed three hundred pounds and owned a local scrap-metal yard, buying scavenged scrap from junkies. The yard stayed open around the clock to accommodate their hours.

“What you got there, Vince?” Rocco decided not to say anything about the sheet. He didn’t want Kelso to get all sniffy and defensive. If the guy had lived, this would’ve been Kelso’s catch, an aggravated assault. But given that the guy had gone out of the picture, any work Kelso was doing now had to be considered a favor.

Kelso wheezed, gave the actor a cool glance and flipped open his notebook. “Darryl Adams, twenty-one, -two, assistant manager. The kid was out here by the door getting ready to close up, nobody else in the restaurant. Talking to a black male in a hooded sweatshirt, pop pop poppity pop, Adams goes down, the black male’s in the wind, running south in the direction of the mini-mall. You got four nine-millimeter casings by the body and that’s, more or less, all she wrote.”

Rocco nodded to the body. “Was he a scumbag?”

Kelso shrugged. ”
I
never heard of him.”

“A robbery?”

“Too fast.”

“So what do you think? Drugs? Nine millimeter, right?”

Kelso shrugged again.

“Got some witnesses?”

Kelso took Rocco by the elbow and walked him around to the back of the restaurant, past the dumpsters, out of everybody’s view. At the far end of the rear wall, a black woman, anywhere from thirty to fifty years old, sat on the ground with her chin in her chest, her back against the brick. Someone had penned her in with crime scene tape in a loose, three-garbage-can triangle.

Rocco shook his head as if to clear his vision. “What’s with the fucking corral?”