Clockers (64 page)

“I hear that,” Rocco said automatically.

Jimmy drained his Gibson and leaned forward on his forearms. “So what do you want, Rocco?”

Rocco slid his ziti to the side and took a deep breath. “OK, here we go. I want one crack at your client. You be there, sit in my lap, sit in
his
lap, anything, any way you want, any conditions, just so long as I get a shot at the truth. And if he tells me what I
think
he’s gonna tell me, and it’s the truth, I can go back to my boss and I’m pretty sure he’ll drop the charges. Then I go after this other brother, nail his dong to the wall.”

“What makes you think you can do what / couldn’t do?” Jimmy said, his expression predictably unhappy.

“Hey,” Rocco said, smiling, “I make all these bozos think I love them. That’s how I fuck them.”

He thought Jimmy would laugh at that, but the worried look stayed.

“Does your boss know you’re doing this with me here?”

“Nah,” Rocco said, feeling charged now, “this is between me and you. He’d go fucking nuts if he knew what I’m doing. I’ll go to him when I got it wrapped. This is just me for now.”

Jimmy sighed and twisted sideways in his chair. “Rocco, think this through. Right now we’re off the record. But the minute I agree to this it becomes official. What if he doesn’t tell you shit? What if he sticks to his story and we go to trial? You’re doing this on the sly, but I get you up on the stand and you
know
I’m gonna ask you, ‘Was there ever a time when you ceased to believe that Victor Dunham did this and thought someone else did?’ And how are you gonna answer that? Are you gonna
lie?
Or are you gonna jeopardize the state’s case?”

Rocco felt a rush of cool air in his belly. He hadn’t thought through this angle of things either, but the bravado of his own proposal carried him forward. “Hey, I’ll deal with it, you know me. Worse comes to worse, they’ll pack my ass up, make me walk a beat in O’Brien. Fuck it. I’ll be a detective again in six months. Nobody ever gets hurt in this town for fucking up a case. I’ll buy a few hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner tickets and get my ass back in a sport jacket just like that.”

Jimmy gazed at him woefully. “OK Rocco, look. Let me think about this, OK? I mean, I think you’re a prick, you think I’m a sucker, but other than that we go back a long time and, ah, we’re kind of like the
glue
…” Jimmy pressed his splayed hands together. “We’re the
spine
of things, you know what I mean? We’re … if things are gonna work around here, you know, society, it’s important that you do what you do and I do what I do, you know?”

“Jimmy.” Rocco put a hand on his arm. “You’re boring the shit out of me.”

Jimmy laughed, a blush coming into his cheeks. “OK. Alls I’m trying to say is, let me think about this, because if I say OK and you fuck up, it’s your ass. And then I have no choice but to go after you, and that would make me feel like shit.”

Rocco faltered. The fact that Jimmy seemed to be more concerned about Rocco’s skin than his own, or even his client’s, made Rocco wonder if he might be stepping off a cliff here. And now that the deal seemed to be just about closed, Rocco wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go through with it.

As if reading Rocco’s mind, Jimmy said, “You ever hear that expression, ‘If God hates your guts, he grants you your deepest wish’?”

Rocco stuck his fork in the ziti, leaving it there like a naked flagpole. “Jimmy, I tell you what. Give me a few days, let me do some digging on this Victor kid. If I come up with anything negative I’ll back out of this, but if I still feel like I feel about him now? You let me in there with him, plus you can have all my character witnesses, all the Citizen Victor stuff I dig up, everything. It’s like I’m working for you, and you
know
I’m fucking six times better an investigator than any of those clowns in the defender’s office.”

He thought about the deal he had just offered. Right off the top of his head—not bad at all.

“Jimmy.” Rocco held out his hands, palms up, and raised his shoulders. “Alls I’m asking you to do is give me a chance to throw out my own arrest.”

Eager to resolve his own doubts about Victor’s innocence, Rocco had called in sick from the restaurant, and now, two hours after breaking bread with Jimmy Newton in Dempsy, he sat under a Cinzano umbrella on Columbus Avenue in New York, a vodka collins in front of his clasped hands, directly across the street from To Bind an Egg, the store where Victor had worked as a security guard.

A marathon must have just finished over in Central Park, because it seemed that every third person on the street was bare-legged and wore waffle-tread sneakers. The runners staggered past him looking pained but happy, huddled inside plastic silver blankets that were covered in a checkerboard pattern of alternating Big Apples and Lemon Pledge bottles. Watching them, Rocco felt angry and defensive. Sometimes he hated New York.

Self-conscious about his own corrupted dimensions, he pushed himself away from the table and trotted across the traffic to the store. He almost sprained his wrist pushing on the locked door, then jumped a little at the delayed buzz of electronic permission.

To Bind an Egg was about the size of a bedroom, a claustrophobic explosion of Japanese knickknacks, everything appearing to be lacquered, burnished, varnished, petite. It was like walking inside an Oriental hope chest: there was hardly room to move; even the walls were plastered with T-shaped kimonos pinned helter-skelter like a flock of kites frozen in midflight. The store had a subtle scent—not unpleasant, just there—somewhere between tea leaves and potpourri, which gave Rocco a chalky catch in the back of his throat.

Two people worked in the store, a blond woman sorting cookbooks in the back and a short Puerto Rican kid in a blazer, striped tie and charcoal slacks. The collar of his shirt was frayed, and he stood uneasily against a rack of kimonos. Rocco assumed he was Victor’s replacement.

“Hi!” The blond woman greeted Rocco so cheerfully that for a second he wondered if they used to go out. She was tiny, the perfect size for the store.

“How you doing?” Rocco’s eyes fell on a wicker basket filled with smooth greenish-black pebbles.

“Good! What can I help you with?”

Rocco took out his badge and eyed a child-size kimono on the wall, priced at sixty dollars. “I’m Rocco Klein, with the Dempsy County—”

“Shit, that poor kid. Tell me about it. He was such a doll. I still can’t believe it.”

Rocco hesitated, wondering if she was referring to Victor or Darryl Adams.

“Are you the owner?”

“Yeah, Kiki Cord.” She gave Rocco her hand.

“Did you know him well? Victor?”

“Hey, you see how small this place is? It was me and him, thirty hours a week in here.”

“So you know him well?”

“Look, I don’t know how well you can say you know
any
of these kids, but Victor—a doll, a gentleman and a doll.”

“Well, let me just ask you. I’m doing some background, we’re trying to put something together here. How often was he late for work? Was he ever late for work?”

“Late for work?” She made a face. “Swiss movement, that kid.”

“Did you ever suspect him of stealing?”

She reared back in disdain at the question.

“Did the other employees ever see him steal?”

“What others?” She laughed. “I can’t even afford me.”

Rocco smiled sympathetically. “Did he ever catch anybody stealing, then let them go?”

“Do you mean, was he in cahoots with anybody?
That
would break my heart.”

A half-dozen miniature trees stood near the cash register. Rocco was momentarily distracted by their gnarled yet delicate wholeness.

“Bonsai,” she said, reading his eyes.

“Yeah, that’s what they said when they crashed their planes into the battleships, right?”

“That’s
bonzai

Rocco smiled tightly at her, then looked out at the endless stream of half-dead runners. He was sweating profusely.

“Victor—he ever have any visitors?”

“Nope.”

“Anybody ever come to pick him up?”

“Nope.”

“Did he ever make friends with anybody, like a customer?”

“Nope.”

Rocco pulled a few mug shots from his pocket. Strike first. “Have you ever seen this guy around here?”

“Nope.”

Then Rodney. “Him?”

“Nope, and I hope I never do.”

Then Darryl Adams’s employment ID from Ahab’s. “How about him?”

“Nope.”

“Awright.” Rocco packed away the photos, looking at the Puerto Rican kid. He was so quiet and still that Rocco had forgotten all about him.

“He just started yesterday,” Kiki whispered.

“Yeah? Let me ask you. How’d you find Victor? You didn’t get him through an agency, did you?”

She gave Rocco a hesitant look.

“Hey, I’m not with the IRS.”

“Is this going into any official report?”

“If it does, I’ll leave this part out. I don’t want to make trouble for you. You’re talking to me here, and I appreciate it.”

“I’m … I don’t care about the IRS.” Her voice dropped. “I live in Newport City—you know, that development in Jersey City?”

“Oh yeah, that’s nice there.”

“But no.” Her voice dropped even lower, now becoming a murmur. “I was jogging one afternoon last year in Liberty State Park? This kid comes out, knocks me down, starts … you know. There were two men, at least, who saw it, and both of them just kept walking. Meanwhile, this kid’s trying to get me in the bushes, and I’m screaming. And for a couple of minutes nothing, no help from anybody. But finally, Victor was coming by with one of his kids. He hears me, he starts walking toward us, and the kid who was trying to to
get
me runs away He was the only one who helped Victor, and he was the smallest of the three men. All I got was a little scratched up, but I was shaking like a leaf.”

Kiki raised her arms as if to hold something at eye level; with fingers extended, her hands started to tremble. “Anyway, he starts following this other kid, but then he sees me, how I’m shaking, and he stays with me. I see he’s with his little boy, I feel like he’s on the up-and-up, and then he offers me a ride to a police station. So we began talking—
me
mainly, ninety miles an hour, but the truth was, I didn’t want to go to the police station with this thing. Anyway, I offered him money, some kind of thank you, but he wouldn’t take it. It’s like, who was that masked man? And the next day I go in to work—here—and I’m all alone and I start thinking about that
kid,
the one who dragged me, and I start shaking again. I had to close the store. I couldn’t be in here alone—I was
sure
someone would come in and … Maybe you think I’m crazy because this is Columbus Avenue, but you don’t know what goes on here. With the kids? It’s everywhere now. And the store owners, we’re like victims to them. You wouldn’t believe these last two years. It’s horrible nobody’s safe they hunt You like in packs I always dealt with it before, but all ‘of a sudden I’m so scared with this image, this memory that I can’t, I can’t be alone. Three days in row I had to close up in the middle of the afternoon, and pretty soon I’m on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I figure I’ve got to hire a security guard I’ve got to pet somebody in here with me otherwise I’ll never open again So first I get somebody from an agency but the guy frightened me more than that kid Big sullen a beard—all day he’s looking at me with that
beard
I can’t stand it” She shuddered “So I get rid of him and I start thinking How about that kid who helped me? A gentleman a family man, clean-cut I remember he told me that he works at this godawful Hambone’s, so I go down there, Hi, remember me? I offer him ten dollars an hour free and clear, all he’s got to do is stand there and keep me company, but he says no, he can’t, he’s got this job here, this responsibility. Then, the next day, who should come in the store but Victor, all dressed up. He says he’s been thinking, he can shift to nights, work nights, do me days. He’s trying to save up, he wants to move his family into some co-op apartment, he needs the money.”

Rocco was getting pumped again. Kiki’s story was starting to purge him of his fears, make him believe again in his hunches. What a great story for Jimmy Newton, for the jury: the kid’s a fucking hero.

“And I got to tell you something,” Kiki said. “It turned out not to be such an easy job, working for me. Not because of
me,
but we have a high school about two blocks from here and the kids got sticky fingers. They’re, well, they have a lot of anger. It’s not their fault. It’s their environment, society, whatever, but you know, at lunch hour or three o’clock they walk by, they see it’s Oriental, and immediately they start thinking Times Square, Kung Fu, weapons, they want to come in. So before, it was all me, following them around, watching the hands, the eyes, but now I have Victor. He’s my doorman, he’s my screener. They buzz, he’s right there, says, ‘What do you want?’ And if they say they’re looking for a tea set for their mother or a certain book I happen to have in stock, that’s one thine but if they’re looking for a throwing star or nunchaks he stands in the door and tells them that’s not us and saves them a trip around the store, saves me the worry. But some of these kids, they see
he’s
a kid standing there and some of them see him
saw
him as like his job is to keep black people out of the store. Which is not true but when
that
happens sometimes he had to take a lot of anger coming at him, a lot of verbal abuse.”

Rocco unbuttoned his collar, pulled down his tie knot. He ran a finger along his forehead and it came back damp. “Did he ever get into any fights? Anybody ever threaten him?”

“Yeah, well, a few times kids challenged him to step out or said stuff like, ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’ But the worst thing that ever happened was one time, this kid’s trying to get inside, Victor’s at the door, you know, ‘What do you want,’ and the kid says, ‘I’m just looking.’ Victor says something like, ‘You gotta know what you want ‘cause maybe we don’t have it.’ And this kid, he gets all, he thinks that Victor’s, you know, insulting him. What do they call it?
Dis
sing him. So he starts calling”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“he starts calling Victor a nigger, a security nigger.”