A Visible Darkness (12 page)

“I’m okay, sir,” he said, taking a single cigarette from his shirt pocket and lighting it with an old-style book of cardboard matches. He took a drag and cut his eyes into the bay.

“How’s the family?”

“I see my son on occasion. He’s got hisself close to graduatin’,” he answered, letting the smoke out slowly. “My wife, well, we got divorced a few years back.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I never did get to thank you for helpin’ with the transfer, though,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.

We were both silent, having run out of manners.

“I’ll just get to it,” I finally said. “I’m not a cop anymore, but I’m working a case out of Florida that has to do with an insurance investigator named Frank McCane.”

I watched his eyes jump to mine without a movement of his head.

“I know he was a bull here for some time and your years overlapped some before he was, uh, dismissed. I was hoping you might tell me something about him.”

“Ol’ Milo,” he said, a grin coming to his face. “An insurance man, you say? Ain’t that a hoot.”

Moticker took another slow drag and smiled with a set of bad teeth.

“You’re familiar?”

“Oh, anybody who was around then is familiar with Milo,” he said, lowering his already soft voice. “Mean sombitch and king of the pound, too. But that’s a sore subject round here now, Mr. Freeman.”

“I can appreciate that. But the record isn’t too clear on his dismissal,” I said. “I need a sense of the man without going to someone who might have been a friend or might get back to him.”

This time Moticker’s pale eyes stayed on mine, the eyes of a man with nothing to lose, but also one who rarely came across the opportunity to gain anything close to payback.

“McCane ran every damn thing in here at one time,” he started. “He had a piece of the inside drug trade. He decided whose homemade buck got confiscated an’ whose got sold. He controlled the inventory coming in and out of concession.

“Anybody had money, he squeezed ’em. Anybody had anything, he dealt it. Didn’t matter what color or what kind. Pure mean and pure greedy, Mr. Freeman, that’s the sense of that man.”

Moticker finished the cigarette, carefully snubbed it out and put the butt in his pocket. He cut his eyes to the shop again.

“Milo was running the drug trade. Had other guards bringing the stuff in and then flushing the packages down the toilets before they came on the pound,” he started, barely whispering.

“He knew the pump station. Would plug the thing by flushing an inmate shirt at the same time. Then he’d order one of the cons down into the station to clear it. Guy would go through the shit while the shooters and assistant warden just watched him get down in there and he would stuff the drug packages in his pockets and then come up with the shirt.

“Hell, nobody was gonna frisk that boy all covered with stink, and he’d get sent to the showers and later pass the dope off to Milo for a cut.”

He refocused his eyes on the group of welders inside and seemed to reshelve the memory. “He was the kind of man who knew how to use people and still make them feel inferior,” he finally said.

“The kind of man who might be involved with murder for money?” I asked.

The inmate seemed to roll his answer around in his mouth for a while.

“Not by hisself,” he said. “Milo wouldn’t be that dumb.”

Moticker stood up and for the first time I could see a con’s deviousness in his face.

“They’d be hell to pay if that ol’ boy came back here as an inmate,” he said, a crooked grin playing at his lips. “Hell to pay.”

I could tell the possibility left him with a vision that could keep him warmly amused for a lot of boring nights on his bunk.

“One thing,” I said. “Why Milo?”

He looked quizzically at me.

“The nickname?”

“Oh, hell, that was his own,” he said. “Character out that old war movie
Catch-22.
Milo Minderbinder was the guy that was doin’ all the underhanded dealin’ getting’ hisself rich off the war. McCane loved that.”

We went back inside the shop and I shook his hand.

“Hope things work out,” he said, and I wished him the same.

21

I
sat on the hood of my truck, waiting for twilight, second-guessing my trust, and shooting holes in my own plans.

I’d ground out the possibilities during the flight back from Georgia and wasn’t sure I hadn’t wasted a bunch of time and Billy’s money just to satisfy my need for logic. As the plane had lined up its approach several miles to the west of the West Palm airport I’d stared out on the unbroken sawgrass of the Everglades. Acres and acres of still untouched land glowing gold in the low sunlight. I missed my river. I wondered why I was not back on it, paddling, listening to it.

I had used the river to try to bury the memory of two bullets fired during a stickup on Thirteenth Street in Center City, Philadelphia. The round fired by a sixteen-year-old punk on the sidewalk had caught me in the neck, boring through muscle on its way through. The second round, mine, dropped a twelve-year-old accomplice as he bolted out the door behind his friend. The sidewalk vision of his small face and skinny, quiet chest had gouged my dreams ever since. Out of the hospital, I’d taken a disability buyout and moved from the city streets where I’d grown up the son of a cop. I wanted out and I wanted different. I’d sworn off the cops, but today I was back out in the northwest section of the city, watching the light leak out of the alley and then the trees. I’d turned another corner and wasn’t sure why.

When the strings of cloud in the west turned a burnt orange on their edges and the sky went to a cobalt blue, I climbed into the truck and drove toward the dope hole.

I knew from my time on the beat how much the landscape and rhythm and people of a place change when the light seeps away. When I patrolled the downtown areas of Center City on the graveyard shift I would get up in the daytime and patronize the same delis and music shops along Thirteenth and Arch when the real people dominated the sidewalks instead of the hustlers and bums of the night. More than a few times I questioned which world I felt more comfortable in.

I turned at a light with a hanging street sign labeled Thirty-first Avenue in large letters and M.L. King Boulevard in smaller script below. On either side of the road were one- and two-story apartments, arranged like old cheap motels with long, grassless courtyards down the middle and the doors and single windows facing in. They had been painted a bilious green and you could tell from the texture of the paint that there were uncounted layers underneath. Down the street a sign stood in front of an identical block of buildings that read,
FOR RENT. HOUSING AUTHORITY. SECTION 8 UNITS AVAILABLE. INQUIRE AT HOUSING OFFICE
.

The physical structure was different, but it was just another version of the Washington Street projects in Philly, where I once answered a sick-baby call and had dishes and a brick tossed onto my patrol car from some apartment above.

I turned at another intersection onto the seller’s avenue. There was movement along the sidewalks: people, women and older men, who seemed to have places to go. But there was also a nervousness gathering in the air, an anticipation among the younger men waiting for the early evening trade to begin. I found a spot on the east side of the road in the shadow of a big oak about a block from the action.

In a few minutes I could pick out the players. The sullen guy with his head down and eyes up had spotted me right off. But he was cool. The long black pants with the ironed crease set him aside from the young ones who were no doubt his runners. The dope would never be on any of them for more than a few seconds and only during the exchange for money through an open car window. The stash would be back in some hidey-hole in the alley or under some fender of an innocent man’s bumper. The customers would pull up—some white, some black—and slow or stop in front of the man, looking for a signal which was not going to come as long as I was parked down the street. Some were bold enough, or desperate enough, to roll down their passenger windows and call out to the dealer. He ignored them, turning his head away in my direction and saying nothing.

After forty-five minutes I watched a woman of indeterminate age come up the sidewalk, hips swinging unsteadily. She was dressed in a wrinkled summer skirt and a short top that showed her bare midriff, ribs poking out from the bottom. She stumbled once on her blocky high heels. She was trying to look like an unconcerned girl on a stroll. But her path was deliberate.

When she got to the dealer she stopped, two arm lengths away, and put a hand on her hip. He looked the other way. I could see her head bobbing as she talked, each shift of her hip putting her another step closer. Suddenly, in a movement like a snake strike, the man’s hand flicked out and caught her flush across the face. The violence of it made my own hand jump to the door handle, but I sat still. The girl stumbled back. None of the runners reacted. They kept their eyes to the street as if the bitch-slap was either expected, or a regular occurrence.

The woman slunk away and the man resettled himself on a tall wooden stool. He pulled straight the crease in his trousers and then looked up in my direction as if daring me to make a move. I couldn’t have done a thing. I wasn’t wearing a badge and had to take a grain of solace that I was killing his business for a couple of hours.

22

M
omma never said a word. Now Eddie was invisible to her, too.

He’d sat in the house too long. The drugs were long since gone. He was hungry, both for food and another high. He still had some of Mr. Harold’s money in his pocket. The light was dying through the living room window, so he went out. Under a few bags of bottles and some chunks of aluminum window framing, he found his old winter coat in his cart. He knew it wasn’t winter. He would know when the city started putting up the Kwanzaa banners on Sistrunk Boulevard that winter was coming. But he put the coat on today because he was still shivering.

Eddie had made a decision in the silence of his momma’s house. He would go back to the liquor store and wait for Mr. Harold to show up. It was either there or the jail where he’d first met him. But he didn’t want to go near the jail. Mr. Harold had told him to never come to the jail or the money would stop. And Mr. Harold had been the only one in the forensics ward who really sat and listened to Eddie. The liquor store. It was the only place he had. But first he’d need a bundle to get through.

When he got to Thirteenth and Court he stopped at the corner like he always did to watch the place. He pretended to look in the dumpster at Ringold’s but that’s not where his eyes went. There was something different on the street and he could smell it. Eddie knew his days and this should be a busy one. But the runners weren’t moving and the street was cold. Eddie pulled his coat tighter.

There was only one potential buyer, in a blue pickup parked near the big oak tree, but he couldn’t see from here what color the man was who sat unmoving inside. Eddie pushed the cart forward and saw the girl coming up the sidewalk. He watched her walking hard, her blocky shoes scuffing. She was a junkie. Eddie had tried to lure her to go with him before but she always spat at him and told him to keep his nigger ass away.

That was all right. Eddie just quietly made the offer. If they accepted, he would give them what they wanted and then get what he wanted. That’s the way it worked.

As she got closer Eddie could hear her cussing and could see the wetness leaking through the hand she held to her face. He moved on, distracted but hungry. When he got close to the Brown Man’s runners he could feel them step away instead of moving closer to the man as usual. Eddie pushed his cart closer. One of the runners spit out a harsh whisper, “What you doin’, junk man? Cain’t you see five-oh on the street?”

Eddie never raised his head, never turned around. He just bent over to pick up a beer can and cut his eyes back to the blue pickup that he’d forgotten after the girl. Police on the street?

The white man in the driver’s seat looked directly at him. Not past him at the Brown Man. Not through him like everyone else did. He was looking Eddie straight in the face in a way that no person had done in years on the street, and it scared him.

It was then that the marked patrol car came around the corner and Eddie heard the Brown Man say “Fuck” in a low growl. Eddie stood up and pushed away, feeling the cold eyes of the man in the truck on him like two icy nickels being pressed against the skin on the back of his neck.

I sat watching the dealer on his stool, his wooden throne on the street. The sneer and quick pop of anger had blown a hole in his act of nonchalance. He didn’t like me messing with his action, but he also knew he’d be here tomorrow, and the next day. He knew his customers wouldn’t go away like I would. I’d done my stints on the narcotics cases and done the proselytizing to the local kids when I was walking a beat. I’d stroll up into a group off South Street and know from the active hands going to pockets what was up. I’d try to be cool, say what’s up fellas. They would avoid eye contact except for the one ballsy one who would look me in the face and sarcastically call me officer.

To him I’d give the speech about the penalty for possession with intent to sell, the mandatory minimums. And as often as not he’d recite the correct amounts of product needed to constitute a charge of intent. The others would hide whatever grin was crawling onto their faces. They were smart enough not to push it. Ballsy guy was not. So I would position my body and cut him off from the others, back him to a wall like a good fighter cutting off the ring and without touching him I’d get my face close and watch his eyes widen like a bad fighter knowing he’s in trouble. The eyebrows would raise and he’d say “What?” By then I would have tilted up my nightstick from its metal ring on my belt and would have stuck the rounded end up into the vulnerable notch where ribs meet below the sternum and I would push.

“Not on my beat,” I would say, only loud enough for him to hear. “Not on my street.”

If he nodded, I would let them walk away and I would stand and watch them. Sometimes they would go in silence. Sometimes from a block away I would hear one yell, “Fuck you, cop.” Either way I would wonder why I was out there.

I was thinking the same thing today when I picked up the dark figure in the corner of my eye.

He was a big man, shrouded in a long dark coat in seventy- degree weather. He was pushing a grocery cart down the sidewalk in a slow, lethargic pace. His head was tucked down into his thick shoulders like a big, wary tortoise, and he seemed to be mumbling to himself. Then as I watched, he deftly, too deftly, steered the cart effortlessly around a milk crate in his path and then through the drug runners. I was trying to place him, recall where I’d seen his shape before when he bent to pick up a can. I watched the hand slide out of the coat cuffs and swallow the can and that’s when he looked up and I saw his eyes. They were black hollows, set deep in a face that was dark and emotionless. I could not blink and suddenly felt a fine ripple of muscle along my spine like a traveling drop of sweat.

The yelp of a siren snapped my head away. Blue lights flashed three times in my rearview, and in my side mirror I saw the cop opening the door of his patrol car.

“Stay in the vehicle,” he said over his P.A. system. He got out of his car and stood for a moment. And then I watched him walk up, hand on the butt of his holstered gun. I checked my other side mirror and saw his partner standing behind his opened door, looking through my back window. Two-man patrol, I thought, a luxury in Philly.

When I looked back up the street, the big junk man was gone. It had only been seconds, but he had disappeared. Two residents were poking their heads out of partially opened doors.

“That’s a good place for your hands, sir,” the approaching cop said, staying close to the body of the truck and back over my left shoulder. I had already put my hands up on top of the steering wheel, knowing what made these guys nervous.

“License and registration, please.”

For some inane reason, maybe it was just biological to the species, I said, “Is there a problem, officer?”

He took the paperwork without a word. He was a young guy, mid-twenties, wearing a hard and uncomfortable bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt.

“You’re the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr., uh, Freeman.”

I turned my head to look more fully at him and he seemed older and dumber all at once. He said something behind the cab to his partner and then into the microphone clipped to his shoulder lapel, “Sixteen, Echo One.”

“Echo One,” came the response. The voice sounded familiar.

“We got a stop here off Twenty-seventh on the drug run that fits your BOLO on suspicious persons.”

“Echo One responding.”

The cop again said something to his partner and then began writing off my license.

“White man in the wrong place,” I said, unable to keep my mouth shut. “That’s a real specific BOLO, officer.”

The cop stopped writing, but didn’t look up.

“Freeman,” he said. “Is that Jewish?”

The question was spoken, but mouthed into the air, like he was just pondering the possibility. I tightened my mouth. This time I did keep it shut, and waited for Richards to arrive.

When a dark SUV finally pulled up, I popped the handle to get out but the movement rattled the patrol cop. He was back leaning on the open door of his cruiser and fumbled his pad and reached for his holster.

“Calm down, son,” I said, raising my palms. “I know these people.”

“Hey, hey.
Tranquilo
Taylor,” said the Cuban detective climbing out of the SUV’s driver side.

“This man is the infamous Max Freeman,” he said with a flourish. “Both a friend to, and a pain in the ass of all law enforcement.”

Detective Vincente Diaz came around the truck with his junior executive smile in place and his hand extended.

“Max, Max, Max. Long time, amigo. Sherry said she had seen you and here you are, in the flesh and hip deep in the middle of another of your investigations.”

He shook my hand vigorously and as usual I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or friendly.

Diaz had partnered up with Richards when she came into the detective bureau. The wiry strength in his small hands offset the pleasant, white-toothed smile.

“Hey, Max. What, fishing is no good out in the jungle? You got to come slumming in our pond?”

“I know you better, Vince,” I said. “Your partner tells you everything.”

He looked at me with that playful raised eyebrow.

“No, no, no. Not everything, eh?”

Richards was coming around the SUV, looking at the patrol officer.

“We got this, Taylor,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I still got to take a photo for the field investigation file,” he said, showing the old Polaroid he kept in the back seat.

“Believe me, Taylor,” she said. “Neither your L.T. nor Chief Hammonds want to see this guy’s name on an F.I. card.”

The cop shrugged and facetiously muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” and got back into his car, put it in gear and backed away.

“Max,” Richards said, finally acknowledging me.

“Detective.”

“You got something for us, or is this just a coincidence?”

“I do have some bait out. No bites yet,” I said.

“Couldn’t have been out there long.”

“Actually, I wasn’t sure where the current might take it.”

“But this lovely area is a possibility?”

“Always.”

Diaz was watching us, like a fan at a bad tennis match.

“You two going to go on like this for a while? Cause I’ll go roust some dumpster divers or something else more productive if you want?”

Richards smiled.

While all three of us leaned against the box of my truck, Richards told me the sheriff’s office had moved to step up their presence and visibility in the zone. Although detectives were rarely called to the street without a specific crime, the honchos had sent down word to have certain suspicious situations checked out.

“Like…”

“A white guy in a fancy truck sitting alone watching the busiest dope corner in the county,” Diaz finished my response.

“I got to think you’re off on this theory of yours, Freeman,” he continued. “Our guy doing the rapes has to be some low-life just shagging girls when he can. He’s got to be some zone cat and if these people would just wise up and help us out with some information, we’d have his ass sitting on Old Sparky up at Raiford.”

He made sure his voice was loud enough for the handful of residents still on their front steps to hear. Two more cars started turning down the street but quickly straightened their wheels and rolled away.

“My esteemed partner believes your theory about a local acting as a hit man for the insurance companies is marginal,” Richards said.

“How is some moke from in here going to hook up with that kind of scam anyway?” Diaz broke in again. “These are not your rocket scientists of crime out here. Even if your motive is right, Freeman, the two cases are in no way linked. Your guy is too smart. Maybe out-of-town work. Carlyle there would call up and spill on anybody who was out here fuckin’ with his territory by bringing in more scrutiny by us,” he said, pointing to the empty stool the dealer had abandoned.

“Carlyle?”

“Yeah,” Diaz grinned. “The dealer. His momma probably named him so he’d grow up tough. Instead he grows up and takes on the illustrious street name Brown Man and makes it as a drug peddler just to get her back.”

“You ever have a conversation with Carlyle?” I said.

“One-sided,” Diaz said.

“So he’s not real forthcoming with information?”

“But he’d still give up some cheap local out snuffing old ladies just to keep his trade moving.”

“And nobody’s got a C.I. who’s close to him?”

Diaz looked around again. Some of the neighbors had wandered back into their homes, some had pulled out lawn chairs as if an early evening show was only minutes away.

“What can I say, amigo? You see these people out when the drug shop is open? No. They’re afraid,” he said. “Carlyle got his territory set, for now. And believe me, the last thing he wants is local trouble.”

As we talked I kept cutting my eyes to Richards, caught her watching. The sun was well down but the air was still warm.

“You two done tilting at windmills for now?” she said.

Diaz shook his head.

“Hard as nails and literate too, man,” he said. “You ever have a partner like this, Max?”

Richards was silent, listening for my answer.

“Hey,” I finally said. “Cervantes was Hispanic. What do I know?”

The radios on both of their belts ran a simultaneous string of static and then squawked, “Fourteen, Echo One.”

Diaz snatched the call, lowered the volume and walked around to the front of the truck. Richards and I stood in a quiet that seemed oddly uncomfortable.

“The skeptic,” she finally said. “He only wishes he didn’t care.”

I grinned and looked at her. Even in the dark her eyes were showing color.

“You got something going?” she said.

“I got a long shot out,” I said.

“No. I mean tonight.”

“Uh, no,” I said. “I mean no, not really.”

“Come by later?”

“Sure,” I managed.

“I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

“Okay partner,” Diaz interrupted. “We got to hit the road.”