If I Should Die (7 page)

“Basketball?”

“Well, yes …”

“Where?”

“Around. You know, the usual places …”

“Kid been in any trouble before?”

I looked at him. “Which kid?”

“Sorry. I meant Morris and of course you wouldn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

He flipped his notebook closed and rose from behind the desk. The interview had ended.

I rose also, feeling vaguely disappointed. Weren’t there more questions to be asked? It’s true that I didn’t get a good look at the person in the car and he seemed satisfied with that, but why ask me so many questions about Morris and what he might have seen? Where was the “solid lead” he had talked about at the rehearsal hall?

Perhaps he’d gotten all the information he needed from Mrs. Johnson. Or he’s going to question Morris again. That’s his method. Circle around and around like a shark and then close in.

Then again, perhaps he really has more cases than he can handle.

He seemed to be in a hurry to dismiss me so I obliged.

“If you think of anything else I might be able to help you with, give me a call,” I said.

On the first floor, I glanced toward the rear where the holding cells, twenty-five in one long unlighted row, were situated. The area was quiet and the crowd in the lobby had also thinned out. There was no sign of the two boys in the sweat hoods and no one screaming, cursing, or making hysterical demands. I checked my watch and knew it would not remain that way because the evening was just beginning and there was always a peculiar ebb and flow from crisis to crisis.

A slight breeze drifted in and the “Welcome” banner fluttered as I passed beneath it. Outside, I decided to take the long way home and stroll with ordinary people who were going about ordinary business. I walked toward Malcolm X Boulevard and turned to stroll past the Schomburg Research Center. Inside the glass walls, a small crowd lifted champagne glasses, celebrating a new art exhibit, while across the avenue, an ambulance splashed a whir of red and yellow lights against the walls as it screeched into the emergency area of Harlem Hospital.

I continued to walk, not too fast, because I wanted to think about the questions Danny Williams should have asked me. Questions about the license plate. About Erskin and if he was alive when I had gotten to him. The possibility of other witnesses. Instead, he asked about Morris as if the boy was the villain instead of the victim, but that was Danny’s way, his roundabout method.

T
he temperature had reached fifty-five degrees when I stepped out of Shepherd Hall on Convent Avenue and rushed to a phone. Deborah’s line at the library was busy so I hung up and waited and watched the other students as they lounged about the CUNY campus, convinced that spring had finally arrived.

I tried the number again and her calm voice came on the line: “Research and Acquisitions, may I help you?”

“Deborah? My last class has been canceled. How about lunch?”

“You caught me just in time, girl. I’ll meet you across the street from the Old School.”

The Old School was our junior high school on 135th Street and Edgecombe Avenue where Deborah and I first met in the seventh grade. From there, we went through high school and City University together.

The walk from the campus down the steep hill near Hamilton Terrace triggered old memories of my sister and me sledding down this dangerous incline and curving
into a snowbank at the last minute, barely avoiding sliding out into the rushing traffic of St. Nicholas Avenue. We did this in bone-freezing weather, as long as the snow lasted, and were always sorry when winter gave way to spring.

Walking down the hill now had a different feeling. My sister was gone and I was glad for Deborah’s long, steady friendship.

The traffic on the avenue seemed to move faster now and it made me dizzy to watch. As I approached the corner, I actually waited for the light to change before stepping off the curb.

Despite the warm weather, most of the benches along the park were empty. I strolled past St. Mark’s Church where St. Nicholas and Edgecombe Avenues merged. A block away I selected a bench directly across from the school and opened my notebook. A jogger ran by, circled back, and though he was out of breath, managed to call out: “Hey, pretty. Need some help with your homework?”

“Not today, thank you.” I smiled at the man. Despite his nice strong legs, he looked old enough to be my father. He smiled and waved and ran on.

Minutes after I lost sight of him, Deborah strolled across the avenue. She sat beside me and extended a large brown paper bag.

“Here we are. Our favorite food …”

Before she opened it, I knew the package contained fried chicken sandwiches from Pan Pan’s restaurant, complete with french fries, catsup, hot sauce, banana pudding, and large containers of iced tea.

Deborah seems to have been blessed with a rare metabolism which allowed her to eat five meals a day yet she never enlarged beyond a size 5 dress. She was five feet six inches tall, with close-cut hair and beautiful skin. Her
earrings were the biggest things on her. I was a size 7, and whenever I looked at her, I felt fat.

“How’re you doing, Mal? I heard something in your voice that said ‘Urgent. Come quick. Bring favorite food.’ What’s going on?”

I laughed as she handed me a sandwich. The chicken leg was crisp despite the catsup. I added some hot sauce and took a large bite. Finally I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound as if I were at death’s door. I need some background on a man by the name of Gary Mark. Thirtyish, white, works as director of development for the Uptown Children’s Chorus. Though from the looks of him, seems he belongs down on Wall Street. Corporate type, big time. Success written all over him.”

She made a note of his name. Aside from her position as a researcher, she was also a writer who knew how to get a handle on anything in the city that needed knowing. Her mind was like an encyclopedia and her memory rivaled a computer chip. She had been that way ever since our junior high school days.

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” she said between bites. “I’ll pull up some of the corporations, brokerage houses, and foundations. Stuff like that. If nothing pops, I’ll scan the scandal sheets.” She glanced at me. “Someone you’re interested in?”

“Not the way you think. I sort of bumped into him the day Dr. Harding was murdered. Everyone was upset at the rehearsal hall but he was more than upset. Frightened is a better word. And I don’t know why. I need some background because he’s around the kids. And Alvin is in that chorus.”

“Oh shit. Doesn’t anyone check on these things nowadays?”

“He’s not a pedophile but I suspect something else is going on. I think he might have a fondness for nose candy. Lots of it. I mean the clothes look like a million
dollars, but there was something about his expression, something had terrified him …”

We ate in silence. Deborah sipped her tea and started on the fries. “Well, I should have something for you in a day or so.”

“Good.”

She glanced at me and reached out to tap my hand. “Listen, if this guy has such a shaky aura, why don’t you just pull Alvin out and let it go? I don’t want to pick up the newspapers one morning and read where your body was found floating off Riverside Drive. Let it go.”

“I can’t, Deborah. Too many things have happened already.”

“Too many things like what?”

“I don’t know for sure, that’s why I can’t say …”

I glanced at her face and saw the same inquisitive look she’d worn since we were teenagers. I wished I could tell her more but there was no point in involving anyone else.

“You know,” she smiled, dipping back into the bag of fries, “when you left the force, I listened to your howling for weeks, but let me tell you now. I was damn glad. You were meant for better things, Mali. We went all through school together. Sweated the exams, trudged up this hill in all kinds of weather, gave up the discos to sit through summer school. And who liked to shake their booty more than you and you gave it all up to hit the books. What was the point of it? What was the point of earning a degree in sociology just to become a damn cop? A GED would’ve gotten you the same job.”

“You know as well as I do why I joined the force,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “You remember that night we were walking down that very hill from school, and less than a block from here, we saw the cops, three of them, beating that brother, pressing his face into that chain-link fence with the heels of their shoes, using their
flashlights on his head. You remember how he looked? His hands cuffed and his face a crisscross of swollen welts?

“And you remember how we screamed? Two women with nothing but our books in our arms and our loud mouths … and screaming all the louder when the cops moved toward us, calling us bitches, asking what the fuck we were looking at? Remember?”

Memory churned up an anger in me that I thought had grown cold, but as I spoke now, it spread to my throat, so hot and thick I couldn’t swallow. I put the sandwich down and turned to stare directly at Deborah, but she was looking across the avenue at the classroom on the third floor facing the park. Our old seventh-grade room where we had not yet learned the meaning of the limitations of blackness.

“That wasn’t fair, Mali. I had nightmares for years after. I tried hard to forget that night.”

“Well, I tried hard
not
to forget. I’ll never forget it. They were coming for us because we saw what they did and we backed away and they surrounded us, remember? And the only reason we’re alive today, I believe, is because other students heard our screams and had run down the hill. And the people came out of that building across the avenue. Came out in bathrobes and house slippers and curlers. Dog walkers showed up. And the cops knew they couldn’t do away with fifty witnesses. So they called for backup and yelled riot.

“I joined the force because I thought I could work to make sure nothing like that happened again—at least not on my watch.”

“But look,” she said, turning to me. “What you really joined was a force dedicated to one thing: keeping the natives in check. The tighter, the better. How long would you have lasted if you hadn’t hit that cop? Now you’re off the force. You were fired and you still want to
play Dick Tracy. Like I told you earlier, sometimes you have to change the world before you can change the neighborhood.”

“Well, maybe I should join the Peace Corps?”

She saw my changing expression and held up her hand. “I didn’t say that. But you’re back in school and I’m glad. I really am. Social work is your life. Ever since I can remember, you’ve wanted to change things. An advanced degree will make it easier.”

I wasn’t so sure how much easier it’d be, but I bit my tongue and remained silent as she continued. “And this cops-and-robbers thing, I think it goes a little beyond your concern for Alvin.”

I looked away. It was too simple to say that Erskin had been very special to me or that he didn’t deserve to die the way he did. I wondered if I should try to explain what I had felt, kneeling that day in the rain, my feelings floating somewhere between sister love and something deeper, and brushing my fingers over his face to close his eyes. How could I tell her that when I hold my hands together, I still feel the feathery lightness of his lashes against my palm?

“Whatever I’m doing,” I said, “I’ll clue you when the game’s over, okay?”

Friends, close friends especially, seem to have a knack for stepping on my last damn nerve.

Deborah saw this and made a big show of looking at her watch.

“For heaven’s sakes, where does the hour go? Have to get back, girl. I’ll call as soon as I’ve dug up something. Remember what I said … be careful.”

I watched her walk away and I sat a few minutes longer trying to collect my thoughts.

 … Shake my booty. What did she expect? I came by it naturally enough. Not too many people can brag that their mother had been a dancer with Katherine Dunham’s
company. And Mom only quit when she married Dad.

I opened my book again but the print on the page kept sliding away. I glanced at the cracked sidewalk and at the pigeons picking among the small patches of new grass poking through. No one strolled by and I wondered where all the people were, even though most honest folks were downtown, working at jobs they probably hated.

I felt a slight twinge of depression. “Depression,” Mama once said, “is a condition that makes rich white women spend their days going from one store to another, accumulating things they’ll never use.”

Well, I wasn’t rich or white but my AmEx card couldn’t tell the difference.

Why not go shopping? a part of me said. You’ve got the rest of the afternoon free. Lord & Taylor is just an A train away. And while you’re strolling the neighborhood, there’s Saks.

Another part of me, the practical and sensible part which I rarely acknowledged, brought me back to earth and my current status. I was a graduate student with no job, living at home with a musician father. His income was good but it wasn’t my income. Without my own funds to back up this plastic, having it in my pocket meant nothing. The practical side won out and I closed my book, which I wasn’t reading anyway, and headed for home.

On the way, my thoughts drifted back to Gary Mark. Development directors are only as effective as their connection to money sources. Did he himself have money? How did he come to connect with the Chorus? Had he been very friendly with Erskin? Friendly with the director of the Chorus? And if he was as well off as he appeared to be, why hadn’t he had his damaged septum repaired? Most of the movie stars, models, and other rich cokeheads did.