Drumsticks (5 page)

“Lieutenant Frank Loveless said that no motive for the killing had surfaced. For the moment police are working under the assumption that the murder was a tragic accident and that Ida Williams was an innocent bystander,” the story concluded.

Right again. Though the lieutenant had not used such delicate language with me. I had no memory of his using the word
tragic
, or
innocent
.

I ordered another coffee. I was giving my poor body all kinds of mixed signals. Tired and wired at the same time. But I no longer wanted to sleep; whenever I closed my eyes now I saw that nasty hole in Ida's forehead.

Two shots went wild, the Bad Lieutenant had said, and the third killed the victim. Talk about rotten luck. Two bullets wind up in the wall—wild, indeed—but the final one hits Ida so squarely in the face it's as if someone decided to see what she'd look like with a third eye.

Well, I was making an unwarranted assumption there, wasn't I? Who was to say that it was the third and final shot that killed Ida? Maybe it was the first.

Maybe that wily bastard Loveless was correct. Maybe Ed Brubeck, who owned Omega, was in with some dangerous people and they decided to get even with him for welching on a debt. But those people don't send out guys who can't shoot straight. If Ed was the target, why didn't the killer walk into his office and waste him? Or get him as he stepped out of his car?

Brubeck was nowhere in sight when the mayhem began.

Nowhere in sight. How did I know that?

Because when I waved to Ida, I did have a couple of seconds to see who was standing nearby. Several customers. The coat check lady. Ida herself. But not Ed Brubeck. He was in his office, at the back of the restaurant and down a flight of stairs. Nate the bouncer was nowhere near either.

And yet—Oh shit, I thought, I don't know. Lieutenant Loveless had all the reason on his side. His wrong place, wrong time theory was supremely rational.

So why couldn't I accept it?

I had the unhappy answer to that one—rather, Ernestine did: I couldn't accept it because if it had not been for me, Ida would never have been in that place at that time.

It wasn't my fault she was dead. Yeah. I know. I had nothing to do with the murder. But I felt partly responsible. Why? Because I couldn't just leave well enough—or bad enough—alone. I couldn't keep my nose out of Aunt Vivian's business and I couldn't just buy the stupid doll from Ida and walk away. I had to befriend her, impress her. I was riding too goddamn high. And now she was dead. Just like Vivian.

I arrived back home feeling as low as ever, notwithstanding the buzz I had on from all that coffee. My eye fell immediately on the two dolls, my new friends. My luck. They were going to turn my life around, remember? They seemed to be laughing at me now. Well, it served me right for buying into that superstitious bull.

I pulled out my sax and farted around with a couple of the numbers I had rehearsed with Hank and Roamer.

But what was the good of that? We would not be playing tonight. And not for some nights to come, if I was guessing right. The cops had sealed Omega as a crime scene.

At least I did one good deed—only one. I avoided the thing that would probably have finished me off. I did not start drinking.

What I did do, I grabbed Mama Lou and Dilsey by their necks and threw them into the trash basket beneath the desk.

Something was wrong. Something was just so wrong. And voodoo had nothing to do with it.

CHAPTER 5

Filthy McNasty

“Aw … aw naw! What the fuck do
you
want?”

The expression on his face—terror meets contempt—was priceless. And the white paper napkin tucked into his shirt collar didn't hurt the picture.

I gave him a thousand-watt smile. “I just called to say I love you, Leman.”

He did not laugh.

But then, as I remembered all too well, Leman Sweet was a man with very little laughter in him. He was a massive presence with close-shorn hair. In the time since we'd last met he had eighty-sixed the dumb Fu Manchu mustache he wore then and traded it for a bristle brush one too diminutive for his thick lips and massive jaw.

“Don't be calling me Leman, Cueball.”

He wagged a finger at me. His hand was the size of an Easter ham.

I winced at hearing his favorite name for me—Cueball—a reference to the days when I wore a shaved head.

“As far as you're concerned, Cueball,” he said, “Sergeant is my first name and Sweet is my last name.”

“Whatever,” I said mildly. “May I join you?”

“Can I stop you?”

Tough call. I didn't know the law. Was it a crime to pull up a chair at a person's table in a family-style barbecue joint?

“I guess you expect me to ask you to lunch, too,” he grumbled, wiping at the sauce on his chin. “You got more nerve than a little, if I remember right.”

Leman Sweet, not the most gracious black man I knew, was running true to form. He was busting my chops thoroughly.

And in fact that is how our strange relationship, shall I call it, began. Detective Sweet of the NYPD had been one of the first officers to arrive on the scene very late one night when a singularly unpleasant thing occurred in my apartment: another cop—undercover, posing as a down-and-out musician—was murdered on my kitchen floor.

What's more, the dead cop had been Sweet's partner.
I
didn't kill him, needless to say. I had been used in a brutal way by some pretty brutal people, and nearly wound up dead myself. But Sweet, who had taken an instant dislike to me, needed to blame somebody for his partner's death, and he had elected me.

That had happened long ago. At least it seemed like ancient history to me. I never expected to see Detective Sweet again as long as I lived—let alone that I'd be tracking him down, interrupting his mega-calorie lunch, and about to ask him for advice
and
a favor.

“I'm not hungry, thanks,” I told him. “I was just wondering if you could spare a few minutes.”

He grunted. “How did you know I was here, anyway?” he asked.

“I called your old precinct. They told me you had been transferred to a special unit on Twelfth Street. When I went up there, the desk sergeant said you were at lunch and he thought you usually ate someplace on Eighth Street. The smell of pork eliminated most of the other prospects around here. That, and the number of black folks I could see chowing down when I looked in through the window.”

He gnawed greedily at a blackened bone. “Well, ain't you the slick detective?”

“I can also deduce by the pile on your plate that you must've ordered the $8.95 combination platter.”

He pushed his plate away then and fixed me with a direct look. “Okay, Cueball. You showed off your smarts. Now, like I said before, what do you want with me?”

“First of all, I need you to listen to something. Just listen. And then tell me what you think. Here, let me get you another Coke.”

I began with the gift of the Mama Lou doll and took the narrative all the way through my interrogation at Omega—even admitting in the process that I had fallen for Ida's promises of good luck and riches if I believed in Mama Lou's and Dilsey's powers. It took some effort to spill that last part; I was pretty embarrassed by my foolishness.

When I looked up, Sweet was regarding me not so much with hostility as with scornful pity.

“So?” I said humbly.

“So?”

“So can you help me out? Help me find out if somebody murdered Ida. And even if they didn't, even if it was an accident, help me find out who she was and if she had any family. They ought to be notified. I don't want her to end up in Potter's Field like some kind of tramp.”

“What the hell do you think the police are for, girl? They're going to find all that out.”

“Yes, I assume they will. But that cop Loveless has already made up his mind about the case. Loveless is not going to investigate with any—I don't know—enthusiasm. He's too busy trying to look like that TV cop with the mustache and the tight suits. And whatever he finds, he's not hardly going to keep me in the loop. Ida means nothing to him. And neither do I.”

“Loveless does his job. Better than most of them. And don't you say nothing about that show or Dennis Franz.”

“You mean you know him? I don't mean Dennis Whosis, I mean Loveless.”

“I met him. He's a solid cop. And you lucky he didn't pop you upside your head for being such a smartass with him.”

“Yes, I can see now how lucky I was,” I said, unable to push my irritation down any longer. “I'm familiar with your charming investigative techniques, Sergeant. I remember how you extract confessions from your suspects. And how you banged me around when we first met.”

“Don't press it, Cueball.”

I took a deep breath and backed down, shaking off the powerful sense memory of his sweat as he shoved me down onto my sofa and loomed over me like the dark alter ego of Barney, that fuzzy purple icon of the preschool set.

Better listen to him, I told myself, don't press it. You need his cooperation, bad.

“Okay, so you kind of know Loveless, right? That's a good thing, right? He might tell you what they've found out. Will you call him? Tell him there's something fishy about the way Ida was shot?”

“But he told you, there
ain't
nothing fishy about it. Who says there is—Mama Lou?”

“Ha fuckin' ha. Maybe she did, Leman—I mean, Sergeant. But even if I'm crazy to take the doll stuff seriously, that doesn't mean the story doesn't smell. It was just too convenient, the way she was shot. I can feel it. Will you call Loveless—please?”

He didn't answer right away. In fact he didn't answer at all. “Why you always gotta think you know better than the pros?” is what he said.

“I don't. Believe me, I don't. I'm just trying to do what's right. Suppose—just suppose someone did kill that old woman. Do you want them to get away with it? You think it's right to just sweep another black body under the carpet?”

“Don't talk that shit to me, girl. I know more about black people dying in this town than you ever dreamed of. You don't know shit.”

“All right,” I said, calm again. “All right, I know you do. But I have to find some way to put this to rest, man. I'm just feeling so guilty.”

“About that woman? Don't be stupid. It wasn't your fault.”

My God, what was this? Compassion from Leman Sweet? A tiny ray of ordinary human kindness—for me? It left me speechless.

“Look,” Sweet said, cleaning his fingers with the Wash'n Dry he took out of its little foil wrapper, “maybe something smells, and maybe it doesn't. But either way, I don't have no business sticking my nose in Loveless's case—and more to the point, no time. Right now I'm swamped with another case where the powers that be are sweeping a black carcass under the rug. A lot more than one carcass, matter of fact.”

“What are you talking about? Serial killings?”

“You could put it that way. I'm working on the most recent one—the Black Hat killing.”

I drew a blank. A complete blank. “What's the Black Hat—a club?”

“Black Hat was a who, not a what. A kid who was murdered a few months ago.”

“Oh. And how many other carcasses were there?”

“Six others.”

I had more or less been living in a cave the last months, deep into the booze-soaked depression. But even so, I didn't understand how I could have missed hearing about the mass murder of seven black children. “Jesus Christ! Seven kids were murdered? What happened?”

“They didn't all get killed at the same time,” he said. “And they weren't all children. It's the so-called rap wars.”

Blank. Again.

“Rap, fool,” said Sweet. “R-A-P.”

The light suddenly went on. “As in ‘music,' you mean? That kind of rap?”

“You ain't too dumb, are you?”

A dim memory of a news bulletin: a well-known rapper shot to death as he rode in the back of a limo on Grand Central Parkway. But that seemed like at least a year ago. I asked Sweet if that was the kid he had just named—Black Hat.

“No. That was Phat Neck,” he supplied, “the fourth one to buy it in two years. He was one of the biggest names around.”

“I see.”

I guess I saw. Since I loathed rap music, the name of one of its big stars meant nothing to me. Rap had been around long enough to begin influencing every other kind of music. It had seeped into virtually every aspect of life in the States. They sold cars and diet cola with it. They used it to teach kids how to read on educational TV. You never saw a movie anymore that didn't feature it. And now it had gone global. Yet it was no huge effort for me to tune it out. I managed to do so because I disliked and resented it, maybe even feared it, because to my ears it was so rude and simplistic, and so very pleased with itself.

“And who were the others killed? I mean, other than this young boy Black Hat?”

“First there was Rawhide. Busta Jelly was next. Then Daddy Homo. Then Phat Neck, like I said. Black Hat happened to be with Droop Rooster and Boom Dadee the night they were hit. He was nothing but a boy hanging on the scene, trying to get a career started. All the others were big names in the industry. They were probably using him as an errand boy or some kind of bodyguard. But he couldn't even guard himself.”

The industry
, eh? Leman was getting all Hollywood hincty. It sounded as if he might actually have been a fan of one or all of the murdered stars. But you're a grown man, I wanted to shout. Don't you already know the kind of simplistic stuff they say in those songs?

“One after the other,” Sweet said. “They all been hit one after the other. Riding in cars or walking out of after-hours clubs or hotels. It looks like the same kind of turf war that killed Tupac in Vegas. A ‘rap war,' like the papers call it. The Department couldn't care less as long as no ‘civilians'—nobody white—get hurt. Let the niggers kill each other over some stupid record label design … or copyrights … or women … or crack … or whatever the fuck the argument is.