Clockers (24 page)

“I don’t know
what
he didn’t like.” She shrugged, brought her eyes up to Rocco’s again, snapping back into focus. “I just want to tell you something. I’m not just a cocaine addict. I
work.
I’m on sick leave right now? But I got a job at New Jersey Transit as a cashier, so I don’t want you getting the wrong impression of me. I have cancer of the pancreas but I’m gonna beat that. I’m going back to work on Tuesday, in fact. I’m gonna stop this cocaine thing this weekend. Get my kids back on Monday from my mother? This time next week? I’ll be walking down the street? You won’t even
know
me.”

“Great.” Rocco nodded in approval, then squinted at her, earnest now. “Harmony, do you know anybody who’d want to hurt Darryl?”

She chewed her doughnut and stared at Rocco’s knee. “Yeah,
me.
I’d like to smack him in the head for not talking to me. I used to change his damn diapers for him. Who the hell does he think he is?”

She sounded a little too hearty now, as if she was enjoying answering his questions. Rocco smiled patiently, hoping she wasn’t about to freak. “Anybody else?”

“I don’t get into his mess. I don’t even know where he is.”

“Who were his friends?”

“I see him with this boy name Lovejoy.”

“Lovejoy? Is that a first name or last name?”

“Lovejoy, that’s all I know.”

“You know where he lives?”

“Nope. I see him on JFK a lot.”

“Who else?”

“There’s this boy Chickadee. They’re friends.”

“Chickadee what?”

She shrugged. “Chickadee. When Darryl was working at Rodney’s Place? Chickadee used to hang out there and they got to be friends. That was like in the fall, or like Christmas, before Darryl went over to Ahab’s, but he still hangs out with Chickadee sometimes.”

“Rodney’s Place?”

“You know, that grocery on Blossom? You know, Rodney Little? He drives around all the time in that Garfield car?”

“Rodney Little, yeah, OK,” he said mildly, red flags going up all over, like she’d said John Dillinger. Rocco wasn’t up to speed on Rodney’s action these days but remembered him just fine from the seventies, when they were both on the street, Rocco in anticrime and Rodney in holdups.

“Yeah, I see him and Chickadee sometimes but, you know, Darryl, most times he’s a loner, he doesn’t hang out.”

“How about Rodney Little? Does he ever hang out with Rodney Little?”

Another fishtail ripple ran through her upper body. “I don’t know. See, like I said, he doesn’t talk to me. But I
am
gonna stop. People say, Oh, you can’t ever stop. People, nobody, can’t ever stop except maybe in jail. But I stopped lots of times. It’s no big thing. You know the newspapers pump it up, but you can stop if you put your mind to it, if you got the maturity.”

“Harmony, do you think your brother was into any kind of…” Rocco shrugged slightly. “You know, funny stuff?” He made it sound like pranks.

“You have to ask him that yourself.”

Rocco gave it a moment of silence, then went for the home run. “Harmony, listen to me. I want you to do something. I want you to close your eyes.” He paused. “Don’t think. Just say … who did this.”

The phone started to ring out in the reception area. Rocco let it go, waiting on Harmony, who now looked as if she was at a séance.

“You,” she said in a low mutter.

“Me?” Rocco reached for the phone on the nearest desk, staring at Harmony, her eyes still closed as he punched in the transfer. “Homicide, Klein,” he said in a distracted monotone.

“Somebody get killed or is it something I should worry about?” Patty’s voice touched him like a cupped palm to the side of his face.

“Hey.” He grinned into the phone. “I’m working.” Rocco felt instantly grounded. What was the big deal about calling home?

“No time to drop a dime, right?”

“Sort of.”

Harmony’s eyes were still shut, the lateral movement of her eyeballs visible under the thin skin.

“I’m just asking, because it’s like two
A.M.
”

“I was at a scene.”

“You just got into the office, right? This call just caught you as you walked in the door.”

Rocco swiveled around so his back was to the victim’s sister. “Can I call you back? I’m with somebody.”

“A murderer?”

“Yeah,” Rocco said, thinking that sounded more dramatic than a relative.

“Break ‘em
down,
baby.” She said it with a mild street spin.

“I always do.”

“Call me.” Patty hung up and Rocco turned back to Harmony. Her eyes were open now, her cheeks slick with tears.

Rocco felt his concentration slip. He gave himself a moment to get it back.

“Why’d you say ‘me’ for, Harmony?” He guessed she would say something about racism, the pigs, or society in general, but she just tilted her chin to Rocco’s hip, the gun there.

Rocco touched his .38. In twenty years on the job it had never entered his head that the sight of his piece might ever upset any of the family or friends of a gunshot victim. Learn something new every day.

“Try again. Who did this?”

Harmony took a deep breath, her thin fingers trembling at her cheekbone. “You say who did things. You know, people
do
things but … I mean, it’s not like anybody’s
proud
of themselves. It’s just situations, you know? It’s where they
find
themselves.” The tears were running free but the voice was still chatty and light. “I mean, I don’t know anybody who’s proud of themselves. Nobody. You know, it’s like a race, and sometimes people don’t have the conditioning. You know what I’m saying?”

Rocco nodded, staring at the smudge-faced Marine in the recruiting poster, who stared back at him with righteous eyes.

The door to the reception area rattled, then opened and closed. Rocco heard Mazilli’s working whistle, a tuneless tea-kettle hiss through his teeth. Rocco smiled at Harmony, putting all questions on hold, and a moment later Mazilli waltzed into the squad room, came up behind Rocco and lifted his interview notes. Still whistling, he ran a finger down the border of the page as he read.

“Lovejoy, Robert Lovejoy. He moved down to Florida two weeks ago.” Mazilli’s eyes trailed the page. “Chickadee, Chickadee Willis. He sells bottles for Rodney Little. Yeah, there he is. Rodney, Hot Rod.”

Mazilli dropped the legal pad on Rocco’s desk. “Your brother sell dope, Harmony?”

“My brother
hates
dope.” She ran her hands across her face, then pressed a palm into her forehead, comforting herself. She rose with her bag. “Do you have a bathroom?”

Rocco pointed the way and they watched her pad across the room.

Mazilli flicked an invisible object off Rocco’s notes. “I bet he sold weight. That twenty-five hundred? He must’ve just sold an eighth of a ki.”

Rocco stood up and yawned, stretching for the ceiling.

“I searched the restaurant,” Mazilli said. “The manager says nothing’s going on there, but I think he’s a lying dothead geek.” Mazilli chewed his upper lip with his bared lower teeth. “I’m gonna go scare up this kid Chickadee. You want to do the house?”

“Sure,” Rocco said. “He lived at the Royal.”

“Aw, get the fuck out of here, the Royal,” Rocco moaned. The prospect of tossing a room in one of Tunnely’s worst sex-and-dope motels made him suddenly ache with the hour. “The fucking Royal.”

“Also, she’s gotta ID the body. The family’s all down south.” Mazilli nodded to the John. “She gonna make it?”

“She can do it tomorrow.” Rocco wasn’t in the mood to top off the night with a drive to the morgue in Newark.

Mazilli nodded back toward the cell. “Your friend in there—what you do, arrest him for driving you nuts?”

Rocco sat back down. “He got a little bozoed.”

“We should get one of them big pumpkin-headed brothers out of County, throw him in there, lock the door. See how fast he sobers up.” Mazilli leaned over Rocco from behind, pinching his nipples. “Honey, you awake?”

Rocco laughed as Mazilli loped out of the office and disappeared into the night.

Rocco wandered over to the bathroom door, hunching his neck, trying to unknot the hour. “How you doing in there?”

The bathroom was dark and she took a few seconds to answer, her voice coming out in a strangled monotone, as if she was trying to speak while holding her breath. “In a minute.”

At first Rocco thought she was in trouble, but then a whiff of butane drifted through the door, followed by a steady low exhalation.

Rocco hissed, too tired to be the law just now. “C’mon out. I’ll drive you home.”

As they left the office, Rocco remembered Touhey, passed out in the cell, then shrugged it off. The guy would keep.

He drove through the three
A.M.
streets with Harmony in the shotgun seat. She was sinking before his eyes; he could smell the crash coming off her like musk. And as they turned onto JFK, Rocco realized it had been six months since he’d been on this street at this hour. He drove slowly, taking in all the activity like a tourist, even waving like a homecoming queen to a street crew that was trying to blow out his tires with their eyes, one of the knuckleheads shouting out, ”
Fuck
you!,” Rocco shouting back, “Fuck your
mother!
“ then instantly feeling juvenile about it.

He turned to Harmony. “You’re on Allerton, right?”

“Uh-huh.” She was pointedly not looking out the window at the crews and customers.

“You know anybody named One Love?”

“One Love?” She squinted as if racking her memory. “I know a song…”

“Yeah?”

“One lo-ove,” she sang faintly, off key, trailing away. Rocco turned off JFK onto Allerton and she touched his hand. “I can get out here, walk a little.”

“No, I’ll take you to your door.”

“I like walking.” She collapsed onto the seat, hugged herself with impatience.

“That’s OK, it’s late. Somebody’s gonna come by, take you to the coroner’s tomorrow. You better get your sleep.”

Rocco dropped her off in front of her building and sat there until she went indoors. He drove down half a block and parked. Within five minutes she was back out of the house, wearing shoes now, heading for the boulevard.

Rocco debated whether to roll up on her, read her the riot act, but instead he drove off toward Tunnely and the Royal, feeling like enough of a prick for not dropping her on JFK to begin with.

The Royal Motel: the last time he was there, two years before, he had been an observer with a basic life support ambulance crew as part of a statewide police refresher course in emergency medical treatment. The ambulance had gotten a call about a white female having a seizure, most likely drug-induced, in the parking lot in the rear of the motel. When they rolled up the front drive they came upon a Hispanic prostitute sprawled in the grass by the office, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound in the chest.

Rocco and the crew figured the dispatcher had screwed up the run description, but when they delivered the half-dead hooker to the hospital, their supervisor lost it, yelling that the white junkie was still lying in the parking lot. The woman they had brought in was someone else, a customer without a number.

Rocco flew down I-9 now, the moon riding with him, silvering up refineries and housing projects. He felt juiced, wondering what he would run into at the motel, thinking that it really wasn’t the worst thing to work through the night. Besides, all he’d be doing instead is tromping around a silent house, maybe even sleeping himself, sleeping right through the Dempsy wee hours, when even the shooters started to freak.

9

AS STRIKE
drove down JFK, away from the cops and the crowds, he ran his tongue over his lips, trying to lick off the red he knew was there, the red of his own vomit, the red that had bloomed through the white sheet covering Darryl Adams. Strike was headed for Rodney’s Place, wanting Rodney to work his magic teachings on him, wanting Rodney to explain tonight in a way that would make him strong with self-recognition and understanding.

He turned down Blossom and pulled up across from the store—except the store wasn’t there. Strike jumped out of the car and trotted back to the intersection to check the street sign. Hand on his gut, he floated back down to where Rodney’s Place should be, but plywood covered the windows, the recessed doorway and the sky-blue cinder block, fragments of script peeking out from around the boards.

Strike looked up and down the street, tasting bile at the back of his throat. Rodney’s Place had been the only lighted building on that stretch of Blossom; now, with the store boarded up, the street had vanished, surrendering to moonlight and desolation, a tiny wilderness of empty lots and broken buildings.

Strike grabbed a sheet of plywood and made a halfhearted effort to yank it loose. Maybe Rodney was hiding inside, he thought. Or maybe Rodney was dead, laid out behind the boarded-up storefront— Champ’s doing—or maybe Rodney had skipped town now that the dirty work was done, closed up shop and split until Strike was either dead or in jail.

“But I didn’t
do
nothing!” Strike squawked to the empty street.

After marching up and down Blossom in helpless agitation, Strike returned to his car, deciding to hit Rodney’s hangouts, continue his search. He headed first for a craps house on Begonia Avenue, Rodney’s newest operation. The game was three blocks from JFK Boulevard, on a beaten down but peaceful side street, and Strike drove up the weedy curved driveway to the garage, hidden from the sidewalk by a clapboard house. He parked on the back-yard grass between a disemboweled Chevy Nova and a gleaming cherry-red Audi, hoping to see Rodney’s rust-eaten battleship. But it wasn’t there.

Strike entered the soot-and-shadow garage and saw a hunched figure sitting on a small stepladder next to a wood-burning furnace that was throwing off so much heat that Strike felt his face redden from halfway across the room. A small grate was open at the base of the furnace, and a milk crate of broken wooden venetian-blind slats lay at the figure’s feet. Wearing a leather car coat, arms crossed over his chest, the man stared straight ahead into the shadows, looking like the doorman for hell.