Clockers (28 page)

Rocco followed Duck and Tina out of Orlando’s room and onto the exterior walkway that ran the length of the building and connected all the second-floor rooms. The three of them strolled like two sweethearts and a chaperone, with Rocco slightly behind and eyeing Duck’s trademark waddle. They headed past clusters of people who listlessly hung on the railings and peered over the side to watch the now dwindling number of New York cars rolling up for some predawn business. To Rocco, everyone here looked irreparably damaged: they were too thin, too skittish, too aimless. It seemed to him that the Royal was less a motel than a kind of hospital ship, a quarantine ward of the soul, and that the highways separating the motel from the New York skyline might as well be rivers, and the Hudson River itself an uncrossable ocean.

A skinny, crook-backed Dominican kid with a scratchy goatee walked toward them. As Duck came abreast of the kid, he finger-hooked him by the shirt with his crack-ball hand, announcing, “Reynard, Reynard,” and making him stagger backwards, taking him along for the ride to Tina’s room, number 47, the four of them barging in on a tall blond hooker sitting with her legs crossed, arms folded, eyes puffy with anxiety.

Duck stamped his foot when he saw the blonde. “Jesus Christ! You again! What the hell is wrong with you?” He pushed Tina aside, planted Reynard flat against the wall and hunched over the blond whore.

“Nothing,” she said in a hoarse and tiny voice. At first Rocco thought she was a transvestite, then decided she was just big-boned. Her face seemed to belong to two separate women, as if a see-through hag mask had been superimposed on the features of a Nordic milkmaid.

“What, you gave her twenty dollars for a bottle, you thought she was gonna come back with something good?”

“No, I’m just visiting.” Her eyes were blank.

Duck raised his hands in exasperation. “What do you think she’s gonna do for you? She’s gonna get a razor, a bar of soap, shave off some flakes, fold it in foil and take your money. You walk off, go somewheres and blow bubbles. What the hell’s the matter with you?” He held out the twenty to her.

“I just came by to visit,” she said, deadpan, as she took the money.

“You ain’t too street-smart, sister, you’re gonna get killed. Don’t you ever want to play the violin again?”

Rocco laughed out loud. He didn’t think Duck had the wit to come up with such an offbeat line.

“Roc, no shit, six months ago she was playing violin in the orchestra pit.” He turned to the hooker. “What was the show?
Nicholas Nickleby?
”

”
Phantom of the Opera.
“ She followed the ball of tinfoil with her eyes as if she could smell what was inside.

“Can you believe that? She hooks up with this scumbag boyfriend, gets a taste of the pipe? Now she’s playin’ nighttime skin flute in the Toys R Us parking lot. Is that a fuckin’ waste or what?”

”
Phantom,
huh? I tried to get seats to that. It’s fucking impossible.” Rocco turned to the hooker. “Do you have any connections still or are you all the way out of it now?”

She looked at him from the corner of her eye, not knowing if he was kidding, and Rocco felt bad for being a smartass.

“You just gotta get them bottles, huh? Just got to get them bottles.” Duck shook his head in disgust, then pointed his finger at her. “You want to throw your life away, don’t do it in front of me. I don’t ever want to see you here again.”

The whore nodded, gathered her bag and rose. She was the tallest person in the room.

”
Shit!
“ the tiny black hooker exploded and everybody jumped, Rocco thinking maybe she had seen something scurrying along the floor. But Tina charged across the room, almost belly-bumping Duck in her rage. “Goddamn motherfuckin’ Duck, you a motherfuckin’
racist,
you know that? Every time you snatch some white bitch or some white boy you come on like they you goddamn relative. You always like chew ‘em out, sayin’ how they wastin’ they lives an’ shit, but you grab a nigger an’it’s like, it’s like … ho shit, more garbage, like someone left out the garbage. You just
like, fuck
with us, you know, call us names, smack us around, make insults, take away the dope. But you never get upset. It’s like niggers are niggers, they’re
supposed
to be doin’ this shit, they can’t help it. So you a motherfuckin’ racist, Duck.”

“I’m a racist? How many times I catch you with dope, with Johns, with a gun that time? I always let you go, a/ways.”

“You know why? ‘Cause you could care less about
me.
It’s like what I do, that’s not a
waste,
right? It’s OK ‘cause I’m just a black ho’. But she’s doin’ the same shit? Whoa! Watch out, here comes the Duck. Don’t throw your life away. So you can
kiss
my ass.”

“Hey! Hey!” Duck pointed back at the blonde. “She’s a professional violinist.”

“Yeah? Well I’m a goddamn high school graduate. Where I come from, you think that’s no small thing? I know Spanish, I know French.”

“I’ll bet you do,” Rocco said, impatient to toss Darryl Adams’s room and get the hell out.

Tina turned her rage on Rocco like a spotlight. “Who the fuck
you
crackin’ off to?” She gave him the up-and-down. “You don’t even belong here.”

“Thank God for that.” Rocco kept his hands in his pockets, bouncing on the balls of his feet, showing his teeth but feeling exhausted and a little down.

“See, all you motherfuckin’ cops—motel, knocko—you all alike. Goddamn. I’m gonna take me some goddamn violin lessons, see what happens next. Shit…” Tina trailed off, finally spent.

Duck smiled, looking slightly abashed; Rocco thought he might even have been blushing. But Duck suddenly turned to the blond whore and went dark-faced. “Did I tell you to get lost?”

Whispering “Excuse me,” the blonde brushed past Rocco, eyes disconnected to everyone and everything but the craving. She slipped out the door.

“Hey, Tina,” Duck said gently.

“Fuck you, Duck. Get the fuck out of my room.” Tina’s eyes wandered from the bed to the TV to the dresser as she pretended to look for something.

“Tina, tell you what. You’re under arrest, OK? You feel better?”

“Just get the fuck out of my room.”

Duck looked to Rocco sheepishly and nodded to the door. “I’m gonna be watching you, Tina.” Duck pulled Reynard off the wall as if he was an overcoat on a hook. Rocco followed them back out onto the balcony.

Tina stood in the doorway. She looked at Duck one last time, all the anger in her face drained into a sad disgust. “You even gave her back the goddamn twenty, you know what I mean?”

She softly closed the door. Duck looked down at his scuffed high tops for a moment, then smiled up at Rocco. “I like her.” He turned to Reynard at the end of his fist. ”
You
on the other hand…” Duck yanked Reynard into an open-air corridor and slammed him against a cinder block wall. “You’re goin’ in, because you’re a lyin’ no-good, spic motherfucker snake. I told you I want a ounce by midnight. It’s after four—where the hell were you?”

“I was lookin’ for you.”

“Right. Last chance, my man. Give me an ounce.”

Reynard breathed through his nose. “I was in the hospital.” His voice was a distant murmur, as if he had no interest in his own alibi.

“You were in the hospital. For what?”

“I got stabbed.” Reynard half turned to show Duck a bloody crust on his triceps. To Rocco’s eyes it looked more like a burst cyst than a puncture wound.

“Yeah? Who stabbed you?” Duck didn’t look convinced either.

“This guy, I was just walking—”

“That’s a heart-rendering story. You see this?” Duck held up the foil ball of crack that he had taken from Orlando’s room. “You got like until I count to ten to give me an ounce or this is yours.” Duck stuffed the dope behind Reynard’s fly and left his hand there. “One … two…”

“I tell you who’s got
some
shit in their room but I don’t think it’s a whole ounce. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“An
ounce,
Reynard.” Duck jerked on Reynard’s pants. “Three … four…”

“Well then, like you better arrest me, I guess.”

Rocco rolled his eyes in frustration.

“An eight ball,” Duck said. “Give me an eight ball. Five … six…”

“You know that guy Orlando?” Reynard said. “He’s got
some
shit in there. I saw it on his dresser.” He scratched his chin. “That’s all I know for now, but maybe I do better for you tomorrow, you know, ‘cause I know I owe you, so…”

Duck looked at Rocco and sagged. Then he kicked Reynard in the ass, a little punt that sent him stumbling down the stairs. He flung Orlando’s ball of dope off the walkway into some weedy bushes on the far side of the parking lot.

The New York skyline had begun to bruise purple with the dawn. Rocco glanced at Duck, who suddenly resembled a terror-stricken vampire miles from his coffin, an expression that Rocco imagined was pretty common around the Royal at this time of night. It was an occupational hazard: work your people long enough and you got addicted to their rhythms of soar and plunge.

Rocco pressed his splayed hands together in supplication. “Hey Duck, I gotta get in there.”

“See what I mean?” Duck stood just inside Darryl Adams’s room, arm extended as if he was trying to rent it out. “This kid had pride, no?”

Rocco hallucinated the sweetish smell of indoor death even though the kid had died one town over. It was probably that grape candy scent he had been smelling all night, which he now realized was deodorizer coming through all the vents.

The room was pristine. The bed sheets had hospital corners and the bedspread was perfectly folded under and then over the pillows. A bottle of holding spray, an Afro Pic and three brushes lay on a paper napkin on the dresser, along with loose change in an Ahab’s plastic soda cup and three gold-tooth jackets in a Styrofoam cole slaw cup. Pots and pans were stacked underneath the hot-plate counter in a cubbyhole over which a plaid cloth had been thumb-tacked as a curtain.

“This kid was OK, hah?” Rocco said, taking a thirty-gallon trash bag out of the side pocket of his sport jacket and flapping it open.

Duck shrugged. “Never gave me grief, never ran with any of the scumbags, always looked presentable, hello goodbye, how you doin’. He even complained about the noise once or twice.”

“We found twenty-five hundred bucks on him.”

“Twenty-five?” Duck said. “So I guess he was a scumbag after all, hah? Had
me
fuckin’ fooled. Quiet Storm scumbag. Live and learn … I’m very disappointed.”

“He ever bring anybody home?”

“Not that I know of.”

Rocco looked over the open surfaces in the room for possible booty. “Who’s the girl?” He picked up a color photograph of a black teenager with spray-stiffened bangs. She was smiling, her head frozen at that chin-cocked graduation-picture angle.

“That’s his sister,” Duck said. “She lives in Dempsy.”

Rocco stared hard. It was Harmony, the woman he had dropped off at Allerton less than two hours before. But she looked thirty pounds heavier in the photo.

“She ever come by?”

“Once, about six months ago. She came over to borrow money or something. They had some argument out in the parking lot. Looked like she was hitting the pipe.”

“He have a girlfriend?” Rocco was absently opening drawers, noting that the kid had folded his underpants and pinned pairs of socks with hair clips.

“Down south, I think. He sent money down south. I think he might of had a kid down there, North Carolina, South Carolina. Listen, are you gonna do the bed? I wanna flop.”

Rocco pulled out the bed cover and felt under the pillows. “It’s all yours.”

Duck lay down on the dead kid’s bed and threw a forearm across his eyes. “There’s a bag of hypos in the bathroom, but the kid had diabetes so don’t sweat it.”

“Fucking Duck. You know your people.”

“I didn’t know about no twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“So who did this kid?” Rocco came across a stack of crossword puzzle paperbacks in the shirt drawer. It wasn’t exactly literature, but at least the kid had some books. “Who did it, Duck?”

“Well, if he was laying there still with the money, it must’ve been an execution, right? Who was he selling for? Champ? Or maybe he wasn’t selling for Champ. Maybe
that
was the problem. Or maybe it was just a fucked-up robbery. Who knows? I be
motel
squad.”

Rocco searched the medicine chest and came across the hypos, vials of insulin, some blood pressure pills and asthma spray. “Kid’s in great shape.” He picked up a tube of Ghostbusters toothpaste and felt a fleeting pang of sadness.

Working the closet, Rocco found a stuffed animal in a cardboard box addressed to someone named Isaac Adams in Valdosta, Georgia. Probably the victim’s son. He bagged it, then looked under a stack of empty sneaker boxes in the rear corner and found a small safe with the door open. Inside were three rolls of tape—red, blue and black—a packet of unused envelopes, a sheet of twenty-five-cent stamps and a scattering of rubber bands.

By the time Rocco was done. Duck was snoring. He shook Duck awake and they walked out to the balcony together and leaned on the railing.

“Anything else, Roc?”

Rocco thought for a moment. “No phone, huh?”

Duck shook his head.

“You ever see Rodney Little around here?”

“The dope dealer?” Duck spit into the parking lot below. “I know who he is, but I never seen him here.”

“You ever hear of someone named One Love?”

“One Love? I heard of
Unlove.
You know, UNLV, the college? A lot of the kids are into that school ‘cause of the basketball team. Why?”

So much for One Love, Rocco thought. Probably some idiot who couldn’t spell or even listen right.

“Duck, be well.”

Rocco pushed off the railing, gave Duck a light slap on the back and trudged down the metal steps to the parking lot. Crossing over to his car, he heard a faint rapping from above and then Duck’s voice: “Tina, it’s Duck. Open up, I want to talk to you.”