The Cocaine Chronicles (19 page)

The cops were nice to him at first; they said he was a stand-up guy for turning himself in and helping out with the investigation.

They had interviewed him all day. Fat Tommy said he didn’t “need no lawyer.” He wasn’t guilty. The cops didn’t seem to be concerned about his coke business so much as they wanted to know what he knew about the recent murder of the undercover cop—Simpson— right in the middle of the projects on Fat Tommy’s home turf, La Caja. Fat Tommy assured him he “didn’t have any ‘turf’ anymore, not in La Caja, not nowhere.” Moreover, he certainly didn’t know anything about a cop killing.

“We know you ain’t no killer, Moises,” Vargas told him a few minutes into the interrogation. “But you grew up in La Caja, where this murder went down. We figure you might know something. Point us to the bad guys. We know you’re in bed with the Colombians. They’re all over La Caja these days. One of them called you by name, Moises. He’s quite fond of you. Says you’re a big shot. You’re looking at some serious time if you don’t play ball. Play along and help us catch this killer . . . you’ll be all right . . .”

Vargas offered him a jumbo cup of lemonade and four jelly doughnuts. His high had long ago been blown and he couldn’t believe how hungry and thirsty he’d gotten. Vargas said that the pretty cop who had processed him that morning had asked to make the lemonade especially for him.

Fat Tommy said, “That was sure nice of her.”

“Yeah. Officer Ospina is a sweetie. Drink up. That’s the last of it . . . We need to get started,” Vargas said, and smiled at him.

Braddock took the empty cup, crushed it, and banked it into the wastebasket in the back of the interrogation room.

“Great shot,” Fat Tommy said. “Three-pointer.”

Braddock and Vargas said nothing. Braddock walked to a chair somewhere behind him and Vargas turned on a tape recorder and intoned: “This is Detective Manny Vargas of the Homicide Detail, Criminal Investigation Division of the Van Nuys Police Department. I am joined with Detective Will Dockery and DEA special agent Roland Braddock. This is a tape-recorded interview of Thomas Martin O’Rourke, a.k.a., “Fat Tommy” O’Rourke, a.k.a., Tommy Martin, a.k.a., Pretty Tommy Banes, a.k.a., Sugar-T Banes, a.k.a., Slo Jerry-T, a.k.a., Big Jerry Jay, a.k.a., T-Moose, a.k.a., Moises Rockafella . . .”

“Uh, my name ain’t Moises,” Fat Tommy protested, interrupting as politely as he could. “Some bad people started calling me that. But I don’t let nobody call me that no more.” He tried his sexiest grin.

Vargas looked at him blankly and continued: “This a homicide investigation under police report number A-55503. Today’s date is March 28, 2005, and the time is now 1349 hours.” Then Vargas looked at Fat Tommy and said, “Could you state your name once more for the record?”

“I’m Thomas Martin O’Rourke.”

“Address?”

Tommy gave them his parents’ address. That’s where he got his mail now.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-four, officer,” Fat Tommy said.

“Employed?”

“I was assistant manager at the Swing Shop . . .”

“Was?”

“I got laid off.”

“When was that?”

“1992.”

Dockery and Braddock rolled their eyes, then Vargas said, “What were you doing after you got . . . laid off?”

Fat Tommy fingered his Martin Luther King, Jr. tie. “Odd jobs, here and there . . .”

“What kind of odd jobs?”

“Church stuff.”

“Church stuff?”

Fat Tommy sat up straight in his chair. “I’m a Christian, sir.

And I try to help in the Lord’s work whenever—”

“You get that fancy Mercedes doing this church work?”

“Naw.” Fat Tommy laughed out loud.

“The street tells us you’re a big-time coke man—that true, Moises? You a big-time coke dealer, Moises?”

“Oh no, sir. Not no more. All that shit is dead . . . I mean, all that stuff is dead . . . I don’t do no drugs no more. I don’t sling coke no more. I got a wife and family . . .”

“You high now?”

“What was that?”

“You under the influence of drugs or alcohol at this time?”

“No. Oh Jesus, no.” Fat Tommy wished to Christ he was. He couldn’t make the cops believe him. They wouldn’t give him any more lemonade, even though the girl cop said she made it specially for him. They wouldn’t give him any more doughnuts—they said they were all out. Cops out of doughnuts! Now they wouldn’t even give him water—and he was dry as shit. That Chilean coke had sucked all the good spit out of his mouth. The cops kept hammering away at his story. He shut his eyes. He was only pretending to listen, nodding yes, yes, goddamnit, yes, or gazing up at them with a mournful, wounded look in his eyes.

Their sharp questions droned on unintelligibly like the buzzing of wasps attacking just above his head. Then . . . the cops seemed to go quiet for a moment. Bea’s admonitions echoed in his head and gradually, without realizing it, Fat Tommy allowed a wan smile to creep across the corners of his mouth. Still smiling, he opened his eyes into a narrow slit and gazed down at his handsome shirtsleeves, admiring the shiny contours, like little snow-covered mountains really, that the polyester fabric traced along his thick, short arms as they lay across his knees.

Christ, he loved this shirt!

“Somethin’ I said funny, Fatboy? Somethin’ funny?” Braddock yelled, momentarily breaking through his reverie.

Fat Tommy jumped a little, snapped his eyes tight a moment, then slowly opened the slits again and looked back down at his arms. Braddock continued mocking him. Fat Tommy burrowed himself deeper into his thoughts. He looked at his arms and knees. They were such good arms—good, kind arms; and great knees— great, great knees. He looked down at his hands and knees lovingly as the cops droned on. He decided, with a hot, white tear leaking out of a crack in his right eye, finally, that he loved his knees as much as he loved his dick or his ass—better, probably, now that he had found the Lord again. His regard for his ass and dick now seemed so misguided, so . . . heathen. And these knees were so much more representative of him—innocent, God-fearing, above reproach.

They had taken him all over—all over L.A., the Valley, even to Oak Town once on a church picnic. There was plenty of water there, beer and red pop and lemonade and swine barbeque, too.

He was thin then, and pretty. Just a baby boy—so innocent, such a good young brother. The picnic was on the Oakland Bay, and they’d all rode the bus up there, singing gospel songs the whole way. There must have been a hundred buses, the whole California Youth Baptist Convention, someone said. And it was his knees that helped him get through it, basketball, softball, the three-legged race with pretty Althea Jackson. They were nine years old. Those were some of the best times in his life. And he was such a good guy, a regular brother, everyone said so, and now this lunatic murder and this fucked-up Pemberton, that devil, poking his bloody self like a shitty nightmare in the midst of all his plans.

Fat Tommy ached at beholding all these tender scenes—Bea, the picnic, the tears—all the images like flashing detritus in a river streaming across his upturned hands, it was just too much. He closed his eyes, but the river of images burst inside them, flooding the darkness in his head even more vividly than before: his first day at Teddy Roosevelt Junior High; the time he and Bea won third place at the La Caja Boys & Girls Club Teen Dance-Off; and his best pal . . . not that goddamn Pemberton . . . but Trey-Boy, Trey-Boy Middleton (
rest his soul
). That was his best friend. It was cool Trey-Boy who befriended him when everyone treated him like a jerk, and it was Trey-Boy who’d taken pity on him and helped him pimp up his lifestyle.

It was Trey-Boy. Not a murderer. A hip brother. True blue.

Trey-Boy showed him how to affect a gangster’s scowl, and helped him adopt a slow, hulking walk that could frighten just about anyone he encountered on the street. He’d showed him how to smoke a cigarette, load a gat, roll a blunt, cop pussy, weed, and blow. He had even showed him how to shoot up once. And Trey-Boy never got mad, even when that faggot Stick Jenkins bumped him on purpose and made him spill a good portion of the spoon of heroin he had carefully prepared. Trey-Boy had pimp-slapped the faggot— he called him “my sissy,” and Stick had just smiled like a bitch and turned red as a yella niggah could get—and everyone laughed.

He remembered how Trey-Boy had cooked up what was left of the little amber drops of Boy they could scrape from the toilet seat and floor and showed him how to tie-off and find the vein and shoot the junk, even if he only got a little wacked—it was wacked enough to know he wouldn’t do that anymore. It wasn’t fun at all. He couldn’t stop puking. It felt like now—in this hot room with no water, under this white light. But he wasn’t no goddamn junkie. None of that puking and nodding and drooling shit was for him. He was strictly weed and blow, strictly weed and blow. He wasn’t no goddamn junkie. Let them try to pin that on him. They’d come up zero. Just like this murder. He wasn’t there; he didn’t do it. He didn’t see nobody; he didn’t know nobody.

Trey-Boy had given him his favorite street moniker—Fat Tommy. When Trey-Boy said it, it didn’t feel like a put-down. It was a term of war and affection. Fat Tommy was a lumpy 370 pounds but he didn’t feel fat when Trey-Boy called him Fat Tommy—he felt big, as in big man, big trouble, big fun—there’s a difference, really, when you think about it. A street handle like Fat Tommy made him feel like one of the hoods in
The Sopranos
—his favorite story. He’d made a small fortune with that name—not like he made with Cut Pemberton, when the margins and risks got scary and huge, and the fuckin’ Colombians got involved, and people feared him and only knew him by the name Pemberton hung on him, Moises—Moises Rockafella, the King of Rock Cocaine. He didn’t make big cake like that with Trey-Boy—but at least he didn’t have to worry about a murder beef, and the living was decent.

Such a wave of woe swept over Fat Tommy as he contemplated all this that, softly, he began to weep. His whole bright life was passing before his sad eyes: there were pinwheels of light; a whole series of birthdays; his stint as a fabulous dancer; his wife, Bea, again; his kids—Little Tommy and infant Kobe—cuties! cuties! He didn’t deserve this. And there was his old job as assistant man-
EMORY
ager at the Swing Shop—twelve years ago now—all those great records: Tupac, NWA, Biggie, KRS-ONE, Salt ’N’ Pepa, shit, even Marvin Gaye. He knew them like the lines in these hands that now stared up at him, glazed and dotted with sweat. All the bright scenes of his life seemed to be fading, all of them diminishing like faces in a fog. Even the fabulous good shit that was coming, close on the horizon, that seemed to be diminishing, too. If only he could get a glass of water, or maybe some lemonade.

“I’m dryin’ out inside,” Fat Tommy pleaded, lifting his head slightly. He could not see Vargas, but could hear his footfalls pacing back and forth somewhere behind him.

“Steady, sweetheart. Steady. Just a few more questions and you’re home free,” Vargas said.

Tommy waited for the next question with the same despairing apprehension with which he had endured all the last. An hour earlier Vargas had the lights on so bright that when Fat Tommy looked up the next moment, he beheld not a pea-green interrogation room with a trio of sad-sack cops trying to sweat him for a cop murder he didn’t commit—the whole room seemed to him as a single white spotlight, a moon’s eyeball inspecting him on a disc of light. At many points during the long, arduous interrogation, the men drew in so close on the hulking gangster that the tips of all four men’s shoes seemed to be touching. Now when Fat Tommy squinted into the light, it didn’t even seem like light anymore but a kind of shiny darkness. And he felt as though he were falling through the brightness like a brother pitched off a 100-story building. Vargas switched the lights back to a single hot light again. The trembling darkness in the distance beyond the spotlight seemed like measureless liquid midnight.

“I need some lemonade!” Fat Tommy screamed. The voice startled him. It did not seem like his own, but rather like the voice of a child or woman screaming from the bottom of a well.

Dockery and Braddock pushed their chairs back from the cone of white light that made Fat Tommy look like a Vegas lounge fly sobbing under a microscope. The scraping of their chairs was like an utterance of disgust, and they meant it to be that. It sent shivers up their own backs, and sent a great hot thunderbolt of fear down the spine of Fat Tommy O’Rourke. Vargas cut a rebuking glance at Dockery and Braddock.

“It’s late,” Vargas said, looking around for a clock. They had started this session just before 2 p.m.

Braddock pulled out his watch bob. To view the dial, he swept his hand through the cone of light that seemed to enclose Fat Tommy in a brilliant Tinker Bell glow, and the watch flashed like a little arc of buttery neon framed in white.

“Almost 6 a.m. Sixteen goddamn hours and not a peep from this shithead,” Braddock said. He smacked the back of Fat Tommy’s chair. Tommy shivered briefly and settled deeper into his sob.

Dockery felt around in his pant leg for his pack of butts and stood up. “Just a little longer, sport, and you can get back to beatin’ off in yer cell,” Dockery said.

“Yeah, beatin’ off in yer cell . . .” Braddock repeated.

“I need a piss break,” Fat Tommy said as politely as he could, then added with a smile, “and a big glass of lemonade.”

“Good idea, asshole. Think I’ll go drain the lizard,” Dockery said, and looked at Vargas. Vargas nodded and Braddock and Dockery went out.

Fat Tommy sobbed on. He was still crying when Braddock and Dockery came back in laughing. They both held huge cups of lemonade and they were eating fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Braddock tossed a half-eaten doughnut in the trash.

“I’m starvin’, officer. I’m sleepy. I don’t know about no murder,” Fat Tommy tried again. He shut his eyes tight.

“Pale-ass pussy,” Braddock muttered. “Yer gonna fry for this. Why don’t ya quit yer lying?”

“I don’t deserve this beef. I don’t know nothin’. I didn’t see nothin’. I got a wife and family. I ain’t no liar,” Fat Tommy complained. “Cut was the one who fount Simpson . . . He told us he was a snitch. Not no cop. It was all his idea. We wouldn’t be mixed up in none of this if Cut hadn’t . . .”