Clockers (22 page)

PART II

Closed by Arrest

8

ROCCO SAT
with Sean Touhey in the back of the Pavonia Tavern. The waiter, a moonlighting cop from Jersey City, stood over them, and the Fury, two hours into a shitface, sat three tables away.

Rocco had decided to allow himself one quick drink before getting back to work. They’d be going all night on Darryl Adams, plus he felt a little bad for Touhey; his last two visits had ended in some kind of trauma, so a brief decompression round seemed like the decent thing to do.

“What’s your poison, there, Sean?” Rocco asked over the horse-laughing din for the third time.

The actor blinked. “My poison?”

The guy’s putting it on a little heavy here, Rocco thought. It was just a homicide, not a thermonuclear blast. The waiter lost interest and was now watching the TV behind the bar.

Rocco tilted back in his chair. “Two vodka cranberries.” He winked at Touhey: Trust me.

Both Rocco and Touhey turned as the Fury table exploded. Thumper jumped up, knocking over his chair. “Thumpa! Thumpa!” he squawked in a honking bass sputter, doing the floppy fish, acting like a hyperventilating pipehead. “I’m rocketin’! I’m rocketin’!”

“Rocketin’!” Crunch hooted between cupped palms. ”
He’p
me, Thumpa!”

Touhey turned back to Rocco. “I should have coffee,” he said tentatively.

“Are you kidding me? After tonight?”

Touhey was silent for a moment, then said, “I saw it, didn’t I?”

“What’s that?” Rocco smiled in confusion.

“I looked right into his eyes.”

“Who, Adams? The kid? Yup, right in there.” Rocco felt as if he was in a play, a big haunted speech coming up. He stole a peek at Touhey’s watch, a gold, black-faced antique Hamilton electric: midnight. Rocco gave himself a half hour here, knowing that at least three other investigators would be working the job by now.

The drinks came and Touhey stared at his as if it was a test tube foaming with forbidden knowledge.

“I looked right into his eyes…” The actor held up his drink. “So what’s
this,
“ swirling the cubes, “compared to
that?
”

Rocco smiled, thinking maybe a half hour was too long.

“Where’d he go?” Touhey’s eye followed him from the side of his uptilted glass.

“The kid?”

“Where’d he go?”

“They took him to Newark.”

“Newark.” He gazed at Rocco with loopy affection, his drink half gone. “You’re amazing. Newark.”

Rocco turned red, insulted. “Well, what do you mean, where’d he go? Heaven or hell?”

“Newark. Fucking perfect.” Touhey gave him the one-eyed whale again as he drained his drink.

Rocco stared back at him, thinking, Fuck you too. Everybody in New York, all of Patty’s friends, assumed that just because he was a cop he was incapable of any but literal thoughts.

“I would
kill
to be you,” Touhey hissed across the table. Rocco, startled out of his irritation, downed his glass to keep pace, laughing self-consciously as he wiped his lips with a fist. “You mean, to be me all the time or in a movie?”

Touhey signaled for another round. “In a movie.”

The actor’s words were almost drowned out by another explosion from the Fury table. “It juth be power-phenalia, Big Chief,” Thumper lisped in a high frightened voice, standing again, leaning forward as if his hands were cuffed behind his back. “Tha’s awl you find here be power-phenalia, I swear it.”

The Fury, in chorus, said, “Power-phenalia!” like a toast. Crunch waved for another round even before his glass made it back down to the table.

Touhey cocked his head, fixing Rocco with a challenging squint. “Do
you
think I could be you?”

Rocco shrugged. “Hey.”

“Why could
I
be you. Why me?”

Rocco was stumped for a good answer. Why? Because he wanted him to—but could he just say that? Big Chief belched sharp enough to crack glass. Rocco was grateful for the distraction and saluted across the room. “Nice.”

Big Chief raised his drink in acknowledgment.

The actor touched his forearm. ”
Why,
Rocco?”

Before Rocco could respond, Touhey answered his own question, abruptly becoming Rocco, talking about the time he had first met Patty, leaning across the table, reciting the story in a way that Rocco found riveting, as if he had never heard this tale before, his own story, the actor somehow capturing in the rushes and hesitations all the mixed feelings Rocco had about his marriage, even his fatherhood. When Touhey leaned back in his chair, all Rocco could say was, “You weren’t even there.”

Rocco took a deep breath, seeing his life in the hands of this man, seeing himself vindicated and elevated on a gigantic movie screen. He suppressed a desire to call Patty, tell her this vague good news. Touhey watched Rocco’s face as if he knew just what he was thinking, and before Rocco could say anything else, Touhey reached across the table and hugged him.

“Whoa there, big fella.” Rocco gently pried himself free and Touhey laughed, still pleased with Rocco’s stunned reaction.

Both their drinks were gone again. Rocco glanced at his watch—time to go—but Touhey motioned to the waiter again, and Rocco didn’t protest.

The actor tapped the back of Rocco’s hand with a fist. “There’s only one thing. If I do this, if I do Rocco Klein, you have to be with me.”

“With you?” Rocco cocked an ear. “Like … your friend?”

“You got to keep me honest.”

“You mean like technical shit? Like an advisor?”

“Anything you want. What do you want?”

“Whoa, whoa.” Suddenly Rocco didn’t trust Touhey, became deeply wary of his impulsive, liquor-fueled buoyancy. Rocco decided not to finish his drink, a first.

“I’ll make you a producer.”

“What’s
he
do?”

“Anything I want.” Touhey laughed. “Can you get off next October? I want to do this next October. I figure three weeks in Dempsy, for exteriors, two months in Toronto. They’ll want to do the Dempsy stuff in Toronto too, but that’s why they’re just a bunch of suits, a bunch of sweaty fucking suits. We don’t do Dempsy, we don’t do it at all.”

“So you’re not gonna do it?” Rocco shook his head in confusion. “Hold on.”

“Hey, hey.” Touhey drained his third or fourth drink. “You know why it’s going to happen?”

“Why?”

“Because I go like this”—he wiggled five fingers—“and five people die in Oklahoma.”

“Great.” What the fuck was he talking about?

“So we’re talking October, three weeks Dempsy, then two, three months Toronto. Can you swing it?”

“October, I’m retired. I can do anything I goddamn want.” Rocco was growing angry, but he wasn’t sure if he was angry with the actor or something else, something bigger.

“Well good, you can do this.” Touhey dug a business card from inside his jacket, found a pen and haltingly recited as he wrote: “Rocco. We are happening. Bank on it. Sean Touhey.”

Handing the card to Rocco, he winked knowingly. “Being a cop, a detective, you’d probably want something in writing, something in your hand, no?”

Rocco tapped the card against the rim of his glass and managed a twisted smile. Meal ticket, he had said to Mazilli, you’re fucking with my meal ticket. Rocco felt his face go red again.

“You know what’s gonna be great about this, Rocco?”

“Hit me,” Rocco said, but his head was back into the Job, thinking, Interview the witness first. He hoped she was in his office by now, waiting for him.

“I’m directing. There’s all this mystique and hype about directors and it’s all a bunch of shit. It’s the easiest job in the world. I, I am directing this picture.” He leaned back as if waiting for Rocco to clap or throw his hat in the air.

“Great.” Rocco rose and gestured for the actor to follow. “OK there, Sean, let me earn my money.”

Rocco had to half carry Touhey into the prosecutor’s office—the actor was a delayed-reaction drunk, and the twenty minutes of unconsciousness in the car during the drive to the office had completely bombed him out.

Rocco pushed open the door with his hip. One hand was around Touhey’s waist, and the other hand gripped his arm, which was slung around Rocco’s neck. As they staggered through the brightly lit reception area, Rocco saw the witness curled up on the tattered couch next to Vy’s unoccupied desk, snoring away. Someone had pinned a note on her hip: “Do Not Disturb. Darryl Adams Horn. Witness.”

The actor began trying to walk down the hallway on his own, his shoulder sliding against the wall. “You got a drink around here?” he said.

“Coffee. That’s all we got.”

Rocco steered him into an alcove where a small refrigerator and a coffee machine lined one wall. Facing them was a holding cell that was being used as a storage room.

Anxious for Touhey to be gone, Rocco made a pot of coffee as fast as he could. “I’m gonna have somebody come in, drive you home, OK? I’ll take care of your car, get it back to you tomorrow morning.”

“I want to sleep
there
“ Touhey raised a limp arm toward the cell and sat on the coffee machine table, knocking over a box of sugar packets.

Rocco poured the water into the machine, laughing. “What do you think this is, Mayberry?”

“I can’t play a policeman if I don’t see him through the eyes of the
policed.
”

“Sean, that’s a fucking hole. The toilet doesn’t even have any water in it.”

“I approach all my people through the reverse angle. That’s my secret.”

“C’mon there, Sean…”

“The secret of my success.”

Losing patience, Rocco decided to settle for allowing Touhey to pass out again as quickly as possible. In order to make the cell at least marginally habitable, Rocco had to move out a dozen cartons filled with old homicide files, a collapsible wheelchair in which an old woman had been clubbed to death and a tagged shotgun used in a homicide-suicide two years back.

Finally Touhey lay down on the sleep rack fastened to the wall. Rocco leaned against the open bars, his stomach suddenly in knots, somehow unable to resist asking for a brief recap.

“Hey, Sean, maybe you told me this already and I was too bozo to hear it, but, ah, what’s the story of this movie again?”

“Rocco,” Touhey declared, eyes closed, hands clasped across his midsection, one shoe up on the rim of the lidless toilet, “you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not what’s the
story”—
he pointed blindly in Rocco’s general direction with a wavering finger—“it’s who’s the
guy.
We’re home free.”

Rocco walked into the main squad room, pulling a yellow legal pad and a half-full bottle of Seagram’s gin from a supply closet. He thought Seagram’s tasted like nail polish, but for some reason that’s what most of them seemed to ask for when they were getting ready to talk about what they had seen.

Balancing the gin, the yellow pad and a full cup of black coffee with four sugars, Rocco walked back down the hallway to the reception area. He put the gin and the black coffee on an end table at the head of the couch, not knowing which one the witness would go for, then rolled Vy’s chair up alongside the sleeping woman and dropped the yellow pad on his crossed knee.

For a moment Rocco sat quietly, watching her ribs rise and fall. Lying there in a tight ball, bony and frail, both knees sporting scabs, she looked to Rocco like a wizened child. She smelled more like wine than gin, but the office was all out of wine. His eyes fell to the blank pad and he began doodling, filling the top of the page with trapezoids, not really pumped up for this one, drifting off, pulling out the business card with Touhey’s declaration and for the first time reading the words on the printed side — pressure point productions — daydreaming about being an actor, imagining cops all over America watching TV, watching him play—what else?—a cop. He was slightly embarrassed by his own fantasy, reminding himself that by the end he had been talking to a walking vodka bottle. Spooking himself sober, Rocco realized he had never rung up Patty to say he wouldn’t be home until morning, but he also felt that he didn’t have it in him to pick up the phone right now. The actor had put him through so many changes that he had no idea what to say to Patty, as if a simple call home suddenly required a declaration of self.

The witness snored like a clogged drain. Rocco took out his wallet, extracted Erin’s picture and flipped it over. “Carmela Wilson,” he read out loud, then pulled the taped Do Not Disturb sign off her meatless flank and crushed it into a ball.

Rocco wrote her name on the top line of a fresh page, then lightly smacked her hip with the pad. “Carmela. Carmela. Wake up, wake up.”

Carmela shifted, croaked “Damn” and then, hugging herself, went nose down into the upholstery, trying to burrow in.

“C’mon there, Carmela. Wake up, Mommy.” Rocco kept after her halfheartedly until at last she rose to a sitting position, blinking and groaning, elbows on thighs, her knotted hands cupping her neck, caressing the pain at the base of her skull, her jaw slowly twisting toward one shoulder, then the other.

“How you feeling, Carmela?” Rocco tried to sound chipper.

She squinted at him. “This a hospital?”

“It’s the prosecutor’s office. You remember what happened tonight? You remember that shooting thing?”

She grunted, grimaced against the fluorescents. “It’s too hard, that light.”

“No problem.” Rocco turned off the overheads. The hallway light coming through the glass doors cast just enough light for Rocco to write notes and read her face.

“Better?” He debated whether to ask her if she wanted to use the bathroom, deciding not to because she might fall asleep on the toilet.

“Would you like some coffee?” He gestured with his pad to the end table.

“Yeah, OK.” She reached out and brought the cup to her lips with a surprisingly languid grace, draining off the whole shot in one steady swallow, her eyes popping for a second, muttering “hot,” then reaching out for the gin bottle, filling the cup half full and throwing that back too. She slowly passed a hand across her mouth. “Yeah, OK.”