Clockers (14 page)

“About a month ago this guy, Frank Henderson? He owned a building on Dover Street? He just came from collecting rent from his super, and driving out of there he hit a four-year-old Puerto Rican kid running after a ball.” Rocco looked into Touhey’s face, tickled that it was so close to his, this giant movie screen face in this seedy hallway. “The people on the street went fucking nuts. They stopped his car, dragged him out, these two shitheads, they came up, one grabbed him, the other…” Rocco gently pressed his fingertip to Touhey’s yellow hair, whispered “Bang” and watched him flinch. “Community action.”

“Jesus.” Touhey winced, entranced.

“The shooters we got, but everybody says this is the guy who supplied the gun, took it back after and hid it.”

“What do you call that?”

Rocco hesitated, not understanding the question.

“Is he an accomplice?”

“It’s his gun, he supplied it, he’s a fucking murderer.”

“Did the guy try to drive away after he hit the kid?”

“So they say—he was probably scared shit. White people drive too fast in colored neighborhoods. They want to get out, you know?”

“If he tried to drive away, then he got what he deserved.”

Rocco felt his heart break with disappointment: Another fucking asshole. But he just shrugged and kept his voice amiable. “Yeah, well, the kid only had a broken leg.”

Rising, Rocco heard a loud pop in his knee. “Another thing just to mention. The guy had a money belt on, and when we got there it was empty. You know what I mean?”

“No, what do you mean?” The actor was suddenly pissy, challenging, and Rocco sank with dismay. The guy probably thought he was a Nazi now.

“You want to see the case file? We got some good pictures.”

“Pictures?” The actor cocked his head, a hot curiosity coming into his eyes.

Rocco walked down the hall to the twelve-desk office, empty save for Rockets Cronin, one of the detectives on the four-to-twelve, and a middle-aged, silver-haired Latino sitting against a wall, wearing shorts, black socks and white loafer-style sneakers. He had a decent-size gut under a red tank top, and Rocco thought he detected a whiff of scotch.

Rocco ignored Cronin, who sat at his corner desk working his way through the five newspapers he read from cover to cover every eight-hour shift. Turning to the Latino, Rocco smiled. “How you doing?”

The man nodded solemnly, pointing to the hallway. “My son.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I take him down here. Dect’ Mazilli, he come to me in my store. ‘Where’s the kid?’ OK, no problem. OK? No problem.” He swept the vision of his son away with both hands.

“Good, good. The best thing you could do for him,” Rocco said, thinking, Next to helping him escape. Rocco guessed that the guy probably had some bolida action, the Puerto Rican numbers, and Mazilli most likely had sat in his bodega all day, shutting down the game until the guy coughed up his son.

Mazilli wasn’t especially good indoors, but he was superb on the streets in a way that never interested Rocco. Mazilli owned a combination deli and liquor store on the worst block in the Heights. He got tight with the populace, found out who had open warrants, played middleman between his customers and the sheriff’s office, kept people out of jail and built up accounts in the information bank, the whisper bank.

“The best thing,” Rocco repeated. “Right, Rockets?”

“What?” Cronin blinked up at him, a total deadbeat as far as Rocco was concerned, but with enough political connections to get away with calling himself a homicide investigator and wear a gun around his ankle.

Rocco pulled the file on the Henderson job from a row of green metal cabinets and started back toward the actor, but as he passed the bathroom he impulsively ducked inside, flushing all the toilets and scooping up all the
New York Posts
and
Dempsy Advocates
lying on the floor or jammed behind the pipes, hoping Touhey hadn’t had the urge yet.

Following the same impulse, he walked into the evidence room right next door and opened a few windows. Thirty-odd stapled paper bags sat on deep steel shelves, each bag containing the clothes and personal effects of some of the forty-one Dempsy homicides so far this year. Every once in a while you had to let some air in; otherwise the collective aroma of blood, guts and b.o. coming off the shelves could make it a little close and disagreeable. Rocco straightened up the room, wondering why the hell he was doing this, feeling vaguely humiliated but undeniably high.

Out in the hallway, Rocco hunkered down in front of the actor again, studying his face, watching him absorb the crime-scene glossies.

Touhey sat hunched over in disbelief. “I didn’t think eyeballs were that long. That’s real, right?” He held up a photograph.

Rocco duckwalked around Touhey’s chair so he could study the picture too. Henderson had been photographed sprawled on the hood of his car, his gaping profile soaking in a puddle of blood. He had been shot in the back of the head, and the gases released by the bullet inside the skull had thrust his eyeballs two inches out of the sockets. The gleaming white elongated cylinders were capped by pupils, the end result an expression of cartoon astonishment on the dead man’s face.

Touhey’s eyes bulged a little in empathy—or maybe, Rocco thought, he was just
doing
the guy, an acting thing.

Suddenly a hopeless cry came from the interrogation room, followed by a rhythmic banging. Rocco and Touhey jumped up, Rocco praying Mazilli wasn’t beating on the kid, but it was only Maldonado smashing his own forehead against the desk in grief.

Mazilli saw them looking in the window, crossed his eyes, stuck his tongue out sideways and pumped his fist near his crotch.

“Jesus, I think this kid is clean,” Touhey murmured.

Rocco nodded as if considering it, but he was just being polite. He noticed that he and Touhey were the exact same height: Hey hey.

Maldonado’s voice, muffled through the door, rose to a high, raw wail: “I don’
know
these guy. I don’t know these
gon.”

Driving over to County Jail, Rocco put Maldonado, who was handcuffed, in back with the actor, figuring he’d give each of them a thrill. Maldonado, tilted slightly forward, his hands behind his back, kept squinting at Touhey as if thinking, Where’d I see this blond bitch before, maybe thinking he was a pay lawyer, because he was well groomed and looked like long money.

But Touhey looked tortured. Rocco saw his mouth working, as if he wanted to say something to Maldonado, but
what, what…

After an hour of watching Mazilli threaten Maldonado with every cliche in the book, from thirty years of darkness to unspeakable sexual bondage, and after an hour of watching the kid respond with a heart-rending performance of baffled and quivering innocence, Rocco had gotten bored and decided to cut short the whole damn passion play. He returned to the squad room for a one-on-one with Maldonado’s father and simply told him that unless his son gave up the gun in the next five minutes, the old man could kiss his bolida action goodbye. And in the time it took for Mazilli to smoke a cigarette out on the front steps, Rocco and Touhey sitting alongside him watching the sun go down behind the steel spider of the Majeski Skyway Nelson Maldonado had changed his tune deciding to come clean and cough up the murder weapon. Rocco had no idea what the father used to threaten the kid that was actually worse than County, but in the end he really didn’t give a shit.

Rocco watched Touhey in the rearview mirror, amazed that sitting next to a little three-legged rat like Maldonado could be so involving to the actor, that a job that dealt with an endless parade of shitskin losers—hunting them down, befriending them in order to get their confessions, then tossing them into County—could possibly be of interest to anybody who didn’t get paid to do it. And his wife’s friends were the same way: all he had to do was clear his throat at a restaurant table and conversation trailed off, everybody waiting for him to say something terrible and gripping about his workday. Rocco recalled the office toilets with their newspapers on the floor, the evidence room with its dozens of sad-sack lives reduced to shopping bags reeking of b.o. and poverty: about as shabby and grim a gig as you could ask for.

On the other hand, Touhey and the rest weren’t completely off the mark: the Job used to be enough to take his breath away. And now only six months to go. Then what? Maybe this thing with Touhey would lead somewhere. Maybe he could be an actor if he was offered a role in a movie or something. Well, not an actor, he didn’t know shit about that, but something like that, something with Bigness in it, something that would halve his years, put him on par with Patty and Erin. Rocco glanced at Touhey in the rearview again, feeling a vague anxiety, wanting a drink.

The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.

Mazilli pulled up to the gate of the drive-down ramp and honked the horn. On the sidewalk, a half-dozen women were shouting conversation up to faceless male voices, stick arms protruding from the bars that vertically striped the length of the building.

With an electronic blare the gate rolled up and Mazilli shifted to drive.

“We’re going in?” Touhey asked.

“Usually we just drop them off on the sidewalk,” Mazilli said, “tell them to go in on their own from there—you know, like an honor system?”

“I meant, am
I
going in?” Touhey’s voice was even and good-natured. He seemed determined to be a sport.

“Whatever you want, Sean.” Rocco tried to sound indifferent so Mazilli wouldn’t start in on him too.

Once down in the courtyard by the entrance to the receiving unit, they were surrounded on four sides by the exterior walls of the jail, like being in the pit of an open-air elevator shaft. The only other car waiting to unload was a housing project Fury, looking like a rusted alligator skull. Rocco watched Big Chief and Thumper pull a handcuffed black kid from the rear, maneuvering him out over the folded-down front seat of the two-door junker.

Someone up near the top floor yelled, “Yo, Thumper, you white, Pee Wee-looking motherfucker!” A dixie cup drifted down, hitting the ground empty, but followed by a light mist—piss, most likely. Rocco reached over and hit the wipers and the washer spray.

“Who do dat?” Thumper bellowed up, half laughing.

”
Ah
do dat!”

“Who
ah
is dat?”

“Dat
mah
ah!” Everybody laughed—convicts, Fury, Rocco, Mazilli—everybody but the two prisoners and Touhey.

Rocco’s crew followed Big Chiefs through the steel door, handing over their guns. Touhey moved quickly, involuntarily ducking his head every few seconds as if another yellow rain was about to come down.

Rocco was always startled by the sharp rise in noise inside the receiving unit. Everything was covered in glazed tile; nothing absorbed the disembodied shouts and barks that ricocheted off the walls like bullets fired inside a steel drum. The unit was small, a thirty-by-thirty lobby ringed by doors, three of steel leading to other parts of the prison and two barred, fronting the bullpens—the holding cells that faced each other catercorner across the floor.

At the center of the room stood a raised desk that stretched across an entire wall. The receiving sargeant who presided over all intakes was flanked by two cigars propped upright on invoice stakes on either side of his sign-in book, the wafting smoke eating into the deeper and more outrageous smells that always hung in the air here. Rocco stood against a wall between Touhey and Maldonado, out of the milling confusion of uniforms, plainclothes and unprocessed prisoners as Mazilli attempted to wade over to the desk and hand in Maldonado’s paperwork, his progress checked every time he shook hands or smacked backs with the correction officers and street cops in his path. Sometimes the crush in the room, combined with the post-arrest highs, made Rocco feel as if he was at a church-basement police smoker; all that was missing was an open bar.

Despite the din, Rocco could hear Touhey breathe through his mouth. The actor looked awestruck and ready to cry. But Maldonado was completely transformed now, cold-eyed, bored, trying to look problematic for the dozen or so trusties who had the run of the place and were walking around in T-shirts, drawstring gym pants and rubber flip-flops. These prisoners leaned against the walls or sat on ancient metal-and-wood public school chairs, tilting them back on the rear legs, rocking idly, sizing up the bullpen meat. A lot of them held half pints of milk, and a few had apples. The snacks, the school chairs and the glazed tile walls made the room seem to Rocco like recess time in hell.

“Thumper.” Rocco pushed off the wall and backhanded him on the arm. “What’s up, Cheech?”

Rocco had known Thumper since Thumper was fourteen, when Rocco had grabbed him for dropping full soda cans onto traffic from a highway overpass, then let him slide with an open-handed smack-around because Thumper’s older sister turned out to have been one of Rocco’s girlfriends back in high school.

“Check it out, Roc.” Thumper jerked a thumb at his prisoner. The kid was six three, dressed in blood-red gym pants, a red Nike warm-up jacket and a white T-shirt. He had snow-white high-top British Knights on his feet with no laces, the tongues hanging out and almost curling over the toes of the shoes. He also had his hair molded into a sloped-back six-inch-high fade, with the words “Street” and “Smart” shaved in over his temples.

Rocco read the kid’s head and laughed. “Not too.”

“It gets better,” Big Chief said. “You know how we popped him?

On a shoplifting beef. He boosted a sixty-nine-cent Chap Stick. We go through his pockets? He’s got the Chap Stick in the same pocket with two bundles of heroin and six bottles of powder.”

Rocco squinted at the kid. who had adopted the standard defensive mode of averted eye and tightly closed mouth.

“Maybe he should shave his head,” Rocco said.