Last Chance for Glory (17 page)

“This the only way out?” he asked. Imagining a fire, imagining humans jammed into the narrow passageway, roasting like pigs at a luau.

“There’s a door out to the back.” Jackson’s disembodied voice floated past the back of Kosinski’s head. “But it don’t open no more. Rusted shut, plus Boazman got it locked. Yo, Screw-Boy, come on out here. Ah got peoples with me.”

Blake stumbled coming off the last step. There was no light in the passageway except for the dim circle cast by Jackson’s cheap flashlight. Suddenly, he found himself listening for scrabbling claws, the sharp protest of a disturbed rat; what he heard was muffled snores, humans muttering, coughing, crying in their sleep. He tried to imagine the actual room, the men and women lying on their cots, and wondered just what hell could have motivated them to pay for the privilege of sleeping in
this
hell.

“Jackson?” A uniformed guard stepped into the circle cast by the flashlight. He cradled an aluminum baseball bat across his chest.

“Yeah, it’s me, Screw-Boy. These mens here to see Kamal Collars. Bring him on into the coal room. They got a light in there.”

“What kind of men, Jackson? What do they want with Kamal?”

“Don’t matter. We got to bring him out and there ain’t nothin’ more to it. Y’all jus’ go fetch his ass.”

Screw-Boy’s mouth curled into a frown of disapproval. His eyes narrowed in momentary defiance, but he didn’t argue, despite the baseball bat. Instead, he executed a perfect about-face and stepped off into the darkness.

“This way, officers.” Jackson led them into a small room, then flicked on a light. The space was completely barren; the coal chute was sealed and the furnace had been removed sometime in the distant past. What remained was a concrete floor, plaster walls, a plank ceiling. “This the only room down here what ain’t occupied. Y’all
could
do it upstairs, but there’s liable to be peoples comin’ in and out. I got no way to stop that.”

“This’ll do just fine,” Kosinski said. “Leave the flashlight on your way out.”

Blake, knowing that
he
wouldn’t have walked into that darkness, expected Jackson to put up some kind of an argument, but the security guard simply handed the flashlight to Kosinski and left the room.

“You all right, Marty?”

“Never been better. Say, Kosinski, you think I could take a hit of that vodka?”

“Only if you promise not to kick my ass.”

“What I promise is that I
will
kick your ass if you don’t give me a drink.”

“That’s not a wise thing to say, Marty.” Kosinski passed over the bottle. “Being as I’m armed and I’m afraid of you.”

They heard Kamal Collars before they saw him. Heard the racking cough, the shuffling feet. Blake caught his partner’s eye and shrugged. There was no getting out of it, now, but he found himself wishing for a diver’s mask and a tank of oxygen. Or that he’d let Kosinski handle it by himself. The vodka rushed up into his brain just as Kamal Collars appeared in the doorway.

He’d once been a very large man, that much was obvious to Blake who’d known some true behemoths in his wrestling days, but only the bones were left now. Collars’ filthy jacket hung on the points of his shoulders, collapsed against his sunken chest; his trousers, cinched with twine, dropped over his buttocks with barely a ripple. There were flecks of blood on his lips, more on a handkerchief held between his fingers. His eyes, to Blake, seemed utterly without light, or hope.

“You wanted me for something?”

“It’s about Billy Sowell,” Blake said. “I’m working for him.”

“Billy?” A wistful smile pulled at Collars’ mouth. “How long has it been now? Must be more than a year since he went away.”

“More than two.” Blake looked over at Kosinski, got a nod of approval. “Look, Mr. Collars, my name’s Blake. I’m a private investigator.” He fished out his credentials and tried to pass them over. Collars merely shook his head. “I’ve been hired by Billy’s lawyer to help get him out of jail. I understand that you knew him back then.”

“We were partners. We did everything together but fuck.” Collars’ voice was pitched so low it was barely distinguishable from his raspy breath.

“Partners in what, Mr. Collars? Could you explain that?”

“Old Billy was the greatest panhandler I’ve ever seen. He looked like something out of Charles Dickens. Folks just couldn’t walk by. Me, on the other hand, being as I’m a big, dark, male African-American, white people used to shit their pants at the sight of me. Good for Billy; bad for me is the way you could look at it, I suppose. But Billy had his problems, too.” Collars reached into his jacket, pulled out a pint of Thunderbird wine. He drank deeply, then grinned. “Don’t suppose you’d want some of this?” The grin became a laugh when Blake merely shook his head, a laugh that ended in a coughing fit. “Oh, Lord, we do have fun, don’t we?”

Blake fought off his annoyance, reminded himself that he had a job to do. “A laugh a minute is what I’d call it. Now, you were talking about your partnership with Billy Sowell.”

“Yeah, well the thing was that Billy couldn’t hold onto his money. All those qualities that got him the quarters in the first place worked against him when he was … when he was off-duty. He was little; he was retarded; he didn’t know squat about the streets; he didn’t have a violent bone in his body. No surprise he got ripped off three or four times a week. Me, I was living close enough to see what was happening, but I didn’t do anything about it. Just felt it was none of my business, which is what comes of spending most of your life in prison. In fact, when I finally stepped in, it wasn’t because I felt any affection for Billy Sowell. I was just tired of collecting aluminum cans from trash baskets.

“It was January and we had a fire going in a fifty-gallon drum. They were doing some construction work on the Drive and the city workers had stacked dozens of two-by-fours behind a fence. Me and the boys cut a hole through the fence on the first night; that gave us plenty of wood. I remember there were five or six of us around the fire, drinking and arguing about whether to let the fire die down before the cops showed up. It was very cold, icicles hangin’ down off the roadway, ice on the river, wind blowing hard. If it wasn’t for that fire, we’d all have to go into a shelter and that meant leaving our goods unprotected which nobody wanted to do.

“Anyway, I’m standing close to the barrel, trying to keep my feet warm, and I see Billy come walkin’ up toward us. He’s about fifty yards off when this knucklehead, Kilo Williamson, yokes him from behind. Billy, he gives up the money right away, but that’s not enough for Kilo. He starts to yank Billy’s coat off, so what I do is pick up a two-by-four, run up to Kilo, and hit him smack in the face. Never liked that motherfucker, but that’s not the point. Kilo, he goes down hard, and I hit him while he’s down. I hit him and I keep on hitting him until he starts to beg. Then I take the money and give it back to Billy.

“‘You fuck with Billy, you fuck with me,’ I say, and that’s good enough for Kilo. He takes off for Bellevue and a couple dozen stitches. Me, I wait till he’s out of sight, then I lead Billy to one side and make him a business proposition.

“‘Look, here, Billy’ I say, ‘The fact is you can’t cut it on your own. It’s not your fault, but that’s the way it is. What you need is a partner and I’m the man. I’ll stay with you all day, teach you what you need to know if you’re gonna survive out here, watch your back at night. We split fifty-fifty.’

“Now, Billy might be dumb, but he’s not stupid. After I explain what fifty-fifty is, he takes the deal. We start off right then and there, split the change, and buy us a bottle of Thunderbird by way of a celebration.

“After that, we were together all the time. I got him his first woman, lady named Tonna worked out of a welfare hotel on Twenty-third Street. She took him on for nothing, claimed she’d never been with a virgin before. Me, I had to pay.

“I tried to teach him how to read and write, too, but he didn’t quite get it. Billy liked history as long as I told it like a bedtime story and it had some kind of happy ending. Math was too much for him, but I taught him how to count money which was important. And I took him to the best soup kitchens, showed him where he could get used clothes and shower and find a clean toilet. After …”

Blake, his patience exhausted, finally interrupted. “You know, Mr. Collars, it’s nice about you and Billy, but …”

“I know what you want. You’re here about the alibi.” Kamal Collars’ expression didn’t change. His features remained composed, his eyes remote and lifeless. “But I want you to hear the whole thing, so you can explain it to Billy. I never told the story before and it doesn’t look as if I’m gonna get a chance to go through it again. I want you to tell Billy that I loved him and I want you to know you’re telling the truth when you do. It won’t take all that long.”

Blake looked over at Kosinski, expecting some display of annoyance. He found the ex-cop leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest, one hand gripping the pint.

“Just tell it the way you want to,” Kosinski said. “But remember this—Billy’s in jail and there’re people who want to get him out. You’ve been in prison, so you know what’s happening to him up there. I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that you still think about him, but he’ll be a lot happier if you help get him back out on the street.”

Kamal Collars gave no indication that he’d heard Kosinski. He sipped at his wine, then launched into his story.

“When I was a little boy—maybe three or four—my momma brought home a puppy, told me her name was Nefertiti. Funny giving a queen’s name to a runt of a mutt, but my mother always liked to think big. Anyway, me and Nefertiti, we were together all the time. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters and we, my momma and me, lived with my granny. Granny was an educated woman, had a college degree from a black college in South Carolina, and she was determined to teach me ‘proper’ English, which wasn’t a whole lot of fun. But that’s the way it was: momma brought home the bacon and set the rules; granny nagged at me not to become ‘ignorant,’ ‘worthless,’ ‘trash,’ ‘shiftless’ … hell, her life was filled with traps and over the years I guess I fell into every one of them. But Nefertiti, well, she became my friend.

“You know how kids are; they can make a stuffed toy come alive, especially if they live in neighborhoods where they can’t go out and play. Especially if they have grannys who think the neighbors’ kids are too no-account to associate with. Nefertiti was right there for me, as if she understood my loneliness, as if she chose to share it with me. At night she’d come into the bed and nobody, not my momma or my granny, was allowed into that room. Momma tried it once and got bit on her ankle. After that, if she wanted me, she’d call from the doorway.

“It went on that way for about a year, until one afternoon Momma took me and Nefertiti to the little playground they had in the back of the project. The city had fixed it up and everybody was going down to celebrate the reopening. I wasn’t used to being outside and I was pretty much in awe of all the activity. I didn’t play on the swings or the seesaw, just stayed on the edge of the sandbox with Nefertiti. Late in the afternoon, this boy came over. He was older than me, but I can’t really say how much. He sat on the ground, asked me if Nefertiti was my dog, and I said, ‘Yes, she is. She’s my friend.’

The boy stared at me for a moment; he didn’t say another word, just stared. Then he took out a knife and stabbed Nefertiti in the chest. Then he grinned and broke out laughing. Then he stabbed her again. Nefertiti didn’t scream or anything; she rolled on her side and looked at me with that look dogs get when they’re trying to understand something. I knew she was asking me to help her, but I was frozen. I couldn’t do anything but watch.

“Now the thing about it was that beyond the grief, and there was plenty of that, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have done something to stop that boy. It didn’t matter that my momma told me the boy was crazy, that he’d been in trouble before, that he should never have been allowed to go off by himself. What I decided, as time went by, is that if I really loved Nefertiti, I would’ve put myself in front of that knife. And the reason I didn’t was because I didn’t deserve
her
love.

“I guess you could say that kids take notions and there’s no getting past them. Just chalk it up to that. But what happened is I did the same thing with Billy. It’s like I went through the wrong door in my life and I can’t find my way back.”

Kamal Collars paused, looked over at Kosinski as if to find confirmation. He sipped from his bottle, going about it slowly, deliberately, ceremoniously. Then he took a deep breath, coughed into his handkerchief, stared at the bright red blood for a moment.

“This is the way it went down,” he said. “After Billy got busted, I went to the precinct and spoke to two cops, a white cop named Brannigan and a black cop named Cobb. I told them exactly what I’m gonna tell you now. On the night that woman was killed, me and Billy were caught in the middle of a riot at Tompkins Square Park. The riot was supposed to be about the homeless people sleeping in the park, but it was really a grudge match between the cops and the anarchists. It started with the anarchists screaming in the cops’ faces, then jumped up to bottle and bricks. What the cops did, after they covered their nameplates and badge numbers with black tape, was go out and break heads. If you remember, the newspapers called it a police riot and the cops got blamed.

“Naturally, the two cops, Brannigan and Cobb, didn’t believe me. Which is what I more or less expected. Why would anyone believe a homeless drunk with a prison record?

“‘Look, here,’ I said, ‘I got a way to prove that Billy was at the riot. When the shit broke out, me and Billy tried to get away. We didn’t have no more love for the anarchists and the punks than we had for the cops. Like, it wasn’t our
business,
if you take my meaning. But no matter what direction we tried, we had to turn around because the cops were everywhere. Me and Billy, we were standing up against the liquor store on Avenue B, near Eleventh Street, when two cops grabbed this Hare Krishna dude, threw him down on the sidewalk, and started beatin’ on his sorry ass. I thought they were gonna kill him, and maybe they would’ve, but a couple minutes into it, a photographer came running up and started taking pictures. When the cops saw him, they picked up the Hare Krishna and cuffed him. Now, the photographer was out in the street and me and Billy were standing behind the cops, so Billy has to be in those pictures. All you gotta do is find them.’