Clockers (20 page)

“I told her it’s electronically treated tape. If she walks off she’ll trigger an alarm.”

“She’s a fucking witness, Vince! What the hell are you doing?”

“Roc, listen, it’s OK, believe me. She’s totally fucking zotzed. This way nobody bothers her.”

“Ah Christ, Vince.”

“You want to talk to her?”

As if to answer the question herself, the woman rolled on her side and fell asleep on the ground. Again Rocco thought ahead to the possible trial, the defense bombing out his only witness for being soaked on the night of the murder. Great.

“Awright, look,” Rocco said, “can you do me a favor? If you got a free car, maybe somebody could take her to the prosecutor’s office.” He turned away from Kelso to hide his disgust at how the scene had been mishandled. “Let her sleep it off on the couch. Somebody’ll come back, talk to her later.”

“No problem.” Kelso seemed oblivious to Rocco’s mood.

“Just give me her name and shit, in case she gets lost in the shuffle.” Rocco frisked himself, realizing he’d left his notebook in the car. He went to his wallet, rummaged around looking for a blank surface to write on, settling on the back of a two-by-three photograph of Erin. He took down the woman’s name and address, then walked away from Vince and held the picture of Erin high over his head, showing it the corpse, the cops, the herd, talking to it: “See what Daddy does for a living, honey? See all the nice people?”

Crouching down to unsnap the forensic case, Rocco reached in and took out a few rubber bands, popped them in his mouth and began chewing, something he always did when processing a body. He took out a loaded Nikon and stole a glance at Touhey, who was gaping at the bloody sheet.

“First thing, Sean, always tuck in your tie.” Rocco talked through the rubbery crunch, sucking up saliva.

“What?” Touhey sounded hypnotized, eyes pulled down, mouth open.

“Bend over a body, you get your tie in the chest.” Rocco made a face and handed up a six-cell flashlight. Touhey moved slowly, looking at the light before extending his hand, staring at Rocco as if from a dream. Rocco smiled at him. “I don’t know where the fuck Mazilli went. You mind helping me out?”

“Really?”

Rocco smiled again, thinking, You asked for it.

Down in a squat now, Rocco gingerly removed the sheet. Detectives and uniforms, stone-faced but curious, sauntered over for the show.

“Hello dere.” Rocco looked into the kid’s slack eyes, which came alive with the reflected beam of the flashlight.

The body, dressed in a red nylon running suit and sporting a heavy gold Lion of Judah medallion, was stretched out on its back: legs crossed, arms crooked at identical V-shaped angles of surrender, the head turned in profile so that the cheek was resting on a grimy Ahab’s take-out bag adorned with a cartoon version of the plaster whale hunter waving goodbye, the legend fare thee well, matey! streaked with blood.

Rising, Rocco turned to the gathered cops. “Fellas, you want to step back or you want to smile for the birdy.” The detectives strolled off, and as Rocco focused his camera, Touhey’s hand wavered, the beam of light wandering from Darryl Adams’s face.

“Hang in there, chief.” Rocco made a clicking sound that was supposed to be reassuring, then started to photograph the murder, snapping the body from all points of the compass, both in close-up and from a distance. Then he photographed the streaked and greasy side door. According to what Rocco had been told over the phone, the door had been propped open by the body, and the fact that it was closed made him fret that the scene had been tampered with even more than he knew. Next, Rocco snapped off photos of four 9 mm shell casings that lay near the upturned sneakers, and then he shot everything else, all the random and mundane objects: garbage cans, soda bottle empties, a coat hanger—anything that because of its proximity to the corpse could be reasonably, or even wildly, considered part of the crime scene.

When he was certain there was nothing left to shoot except the full moon, he went back to the suitcase, left the camera in its shadow on the ground and took out a fat leather-encased roll of measuring tape. He fixed the location of the body and the casings by triangulation, getting the actor to read off the distances from the corner of the building and from a telephone pole. Touhey called out the measurements as if he was reciting names off the Vietnam War Memorial.

After bagging the casings, Rocco went back to the suitcase, this time coming up with a pair of yellow Rubbermaid gloves. He winked at Touhey as he worked them onto his hands. The other cops strolled back in for more.

Bouncing on his hams over the body, Rocco gently rocked the head back and forth by the chin, then lifted the dented Lion of Judah medallion, which lay up by the kid’s ear and was still on its chain around the neck.

“Sean, give me some light here. Look.”

Rocco pointed at the medallion, then traced a path with his pinkie. A bullet had skidded off the lion’s head right up into the underside of the gullet and straight through the skull, ending in a pinkish floret of brains peeking out the top of the head.

“Some fucking shot, huh?” Rocco smiled blind into the corolla of light.

“Good thing he was wearing that medallion,” someone said.

“Kid’s got brains.”

“I still think it’s the food here.”

“What the fuck are you eating, Rocco,
dog
biscuits?”

The voices coming at him had no faces. Then he heard Touhey’s: “I’m OK, I’m OK.” The voice sounded hoarse, and Rocco did a double take at that, the ridiculous self-centeredness of it. He shrugged it off and got back to work, spotting a bullet hole a few inches below where the medallion would have hung when the kid was standing. He pulled up the kid’s jacket to take a quick peek at a neat, almost bloodless entry wound, like a small purple welt in the apex of the kid’s solar plexus. “That’s two,” Rocco announced. Examining the kid’s hands, he saw another entry wound dead center in the right palm. “That’s three.” The bullet was trapped, bulging out of the back of the hand below the knuckles but not breaking the skin. Rocco held up the bloody palm to the crowd. “Padre Pio, you remember him?”

“That’s the mystic eye.”

“Who the fuck’s the shooter here, Annie Oakley?”

Rocco looked up, squinting past the light, surprised to see Rockets Cronin, groggy and cranky. In his trench coat and holding his own steel suitcase, he looked like a Fuller Brush man on a losing streak. Rocco thought he must have been bored out of his mind to make the scene.

“Rockets, my man, we need blood and we need prints off this door here.” Rocco indicated an already browning comet-tail of splatter on the lower pane of the side door.

Rockets looked at the door with horror. “What are you, shitting me? I’ll get every nigger in town off there.”

Rocco quickly looked around to see if there were any black cops within earshot. Relieved to see none, he looked down at the body again, blocking out Rockets, thinking, Four casings, fourth bullet, Where’s it at? He grabbed Darryl Adams’s head, giving him a rude, penetrating scalp massage with all ten fingers. He looked for a hole, avoiding the bud of brains, and found nothing, his gloved hands coming away bloody. He began undressing the body, unzipping the red nylon sweat suit, pulling up the white Duke University T-shirt, pulling down the red sweatpants, the red Jockey shorts, probing into the kid’s groin, performing the same vigorous dig around the genitals, nothing, his fingertips imprinting the kid’s skin with bloody coins. He flopped the kid over, face down in his own blood now, noting the jagged hole in his back, the exit wound from the solar plexus shot, saying “Exit” out loud, moving on, stroking the kid’s back, the ash-gray buttocks, then spreading the thighs. Rocco bobbed on the balls of his feet, his calves starting to cramp, and wiped sweat from his hairline with a curled wrist, the rolled rubber cuff of the glove catching some hair, pinching. “C’mon, motherfucker, where you at.” The smell of the rubber bands in his mouth started to get to him, and then he noticed tiny white fragments clinging to the kid’s shoulder blades: What the hell? Thinking bone, lung then getting some on his fingertips playing with it looking into Touhey’s flashlight and holding up his finger. “Rice. Came right out the exit wound. He must’ve just ate.”

Touhey whispered something with “God” in it. Most of the detectives hanging around started to wander off.

“But where the fuck,” Rocco said, probing, squinting, “is the fourth entry? Shit.” He flipped the kid on his back again, his face and hair matted and spooled with the blood he had rolled in, his penis lying high up on his belly.

Rocco looked up again, and for a woozy second the shadows made Touhey, stiff as a statue behind his beam of light, seem ten feet tall. Now on his knees, Rocco felt like a high priest at an altar, preparing the corpse as an offering.

Finally Rocco groaned himself upright, standing with his elbows cocked to keep his bloody Rubbermaids from his clothes. He watched a Mister Softee truck trolling the crowd, its gentle theme song jingling, before it stopped directly across the parking lot from the body and drew off some of the people who had money.

“You finished?” A short bearded paramedic stood next to Rocco, smoking. A bright orange body bag reeking of fresh vinyl was draped over his shoulder like a serape. He offered Rocco a cigarette.

Rocco held up a bloody glove. “No thanks.”

“You not finished?”

“Not yet.” Rocco turned to Touhey. “Hangin’ in?” Touhey nodded without saying anything.

Rocco spied Mazilli in the semidarkness under some shot-out streetlights across the street from the far end of Ahab’s parking lot. He was talking to a ragged bunch of people squatting against the whitewashed side wall of a Chinese restaurant; the wall was a known hangout for a crew of harmless junkies who ate, slept and got high there twenty-four hours a day. If Mazilli was down to canvassing this crowd, none of his blue-chip informants had come through.

Rocco moved close to Touhey, stared down at the body with him, thinking, Chinese restaurant, white rice, white rice, the food in Ahab’s so bad the assistant manager, who’s probably getting paid next to nothing, still goes out to eat.

“Sean, you know what frustrates the fuckin’ hell out of me?”

“What…” The actor’s voice was flat, his hand still training a beam on the blood-frosted face, fifteen minutes past the time that Rocco had last needed the light.

“I watch what I eat, I race-walk, I read all this stuff about health and nutrition, and here I am, a middle-aged two-hundred-pound tub of shit. This son of a bitch, he works in a fast-food place, probably eats greasy, soggy fried shit two, three times a day, goes out after, has three, four forty-ounce malt liquors, Ring Dings, grape soda, all kinds of crap, probably never did a sit-up in his life. And look…” His hand on Touhey’s, Rocco tilted the flashlight down to the body’s midriff. “See that? A washboard gut. I have yet to observe the black male victim in this town with more than a thirty-inch waist.”

“That’s ‘cause they all get killed when they’re twenty-one.” Mazilli walked up out of the darkness.

“Hey, there you are,” Rocco said. “So?”

Mazilli looked back up to the junkie wall. “We keeps our ear to the grindstone.” He nodded to the body. “Was he a scumbag?”

“Well, it’s nine millimeter.”

“You go through his pockets?” Mazilli straddled the kid’s hips, working his fingers into the clothes, finding nothing. He put a foot under the kid’s ass and rolled him over again, grimacing, blowing air and waving a hand in front of his face as some of the gas settling in the body silently escaped. Mazilli pulled up the waist of the kid’s running suit, stuck two fingers into the hip pocket and daintily extracted a folded wad of money.

“Here you go,” said Mazilli, counting as he walked back to Rocco. “A thousand, fifteen, two, twenty—twenty-five hundred in hundred-dollar bills. The guy was a scumbag.” He flapped the money against his thumbnail, reached into the suitcase and came up with two brown sandwich bags, a roll of tape and a pair of Rubbermaids.

“What do you think?” Mazilli held up the bags to Rocco. Rocco shrugged. “Why not?”

They each took a bag, slipped them over the kid’s hands and taped them shut around the wrists.

Rocco looked to Touhey again. “Death mittens, in case something’s under the nails. You know, like hair, skin, from a struggle.”

“Keeps the freshness in, not the flavor out.” Mazilli was down on one knee, writing the body’s name and the Homicide run number on each bagged hand.

Rocco walked over to the stone-faced actor. “Hey, Sean, these are the jokes. You got to laugh to keep from crying, you know what I mean?”

“Hey, Roc.” Mazilli stooped spread-legged over the body, opening the kid’s mouth by squeezing together the hollows of his cheeks. “Check it out.”

Rocco guided Touhey’s hand so that the flashlight was trained on the face again as Mazilli brushed the blood away from the teeth with a rubber fingertip. Something metallic gleamed through the blood into the beam.

“Ho!” Rocco squawked.

“Marvello the Magician. Catch a bullet with his teeth.”

“Hey, Sean. C’mere, check this out.”

Touhey didn’t move.

“Hey, Sean.” Rocco squinted past the light, into the face. “You OK?”

“He’s
grieving,
“ Mazilli muttered, then, digging at the metallic shine in the kid’s mouth, extracted a gold tooth cap. “False alarm.”

He peeled off his gloves and dropped them on the body before going to check out the dumpsters around the bend.

Rocco walked up to the actor, looked into his face. Grieving: Mazilli was right. Rocco was stunned.

“You finished here?” the paramedic asked again.

“Yeah.” Rocco spit out his chewed rubber bands. “Watch the bags on the hands.” He peeled his gloves off, tossing them between the legs of the body, his eyes on the actor. Grieving.

The paramedic whistled for his partner to pull the ambulance up, then snapped out the body bag like a picnic blanket.

“Rocco!” Mazilli called to him from around the back of the restaurant.

Rocco moved hesitantly away from Touhey. “You OK? You want to go back to the car?”