Clockers (32 page)

“Nobody. I don’t know. Somebody else. I got to go. It’s wet, man. It’s late.” A ripple ran through his shoulders. “I’m late, I’m late.”

“Are you OK with them?” Them: Strike was unable even to say “him,” let alone “My Man.” His beeper went off again. “How’d you leave it?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Victor slid around Strike to the street and fumbled with his keys by the driver’s door. “It’s not your play, that’s all you got to know.”

“How’d you leave it? Just tell me that.” Strike scrambled for the right words.

“Not your play,” Victor muttered again, head down, unlocking his door now.

“Take me back over to Weehawken.” Strike shivered, pulled on the locked passenger door, trying to buy himself a few more minutes.

Victor gave Strike a brief blank stare over the roof of the car, then slid in behind the wheel. Ignoring Strike’s hand on the locked door, Victor peeled out down Dumont, disappearing in a screeching turn onto JFK. Strike stood there shaking, dripping, achy, certain he was about to get sick. He knew all the signs.

12

ON SATURDAY
afternoon under a lowering sky, Rocco pulled into the prosecutor’s office lot and parked next to a mud-splattered three-year-old black Corvette, all hood and looking like a long-barreled handgun. For a moment he wondered if the car belonged to the actor, but it was too dirty. County Narcotics, he decided with a small twist of disappointment.

Rocco felt enervated and down, in need of some kind of pick-me-up. The previous night’s marathon was bad enough, but then earlier this morning, before he had finally crashed, he had driven Erin and her babysitter to the kid’s play group, and no matter how much he begged and wheedled and pouted, he had been unable to get his daughter even to wave goodbye to him. She had just stepped out of the car as if he was a chauffeur, taken the babysitter’s hand and disappeared inside the lobby. Later, Rocco had drifted into a fractured sleep, feeling anxious and emotionally hungry, and his mood hadn’t improved since waking.

When he entered the office. Vy was talking low on the phone and sucking a lipstick-stained Merit.

“Is he here?”

Vy put a hand over the mouthpiece and made a squinty face.

“You know, what’s his name.” Rocco couldn’t bring himself to say Sean Touhey.

”
Talk,
Rocco.”

“The actor.”

“Nope.”

“Where’s Mazilli?”

“Out in the field.”

Rocco knew that could mean anything from working an old homicide to playing rummy in a Mafia-run social club. He might not be back for hours.

Rocco walked toward the squad room and saw that the chair the actor had used while eavesdropping on the interrogation the day before had never been removed from the hallway. The empty chair prompted an eerie feeling that Touhey was still somewhere in the building, but Rocco shook that off and took a seat at his desk.

He turned on the TV over the filing cabinets, caught a few minutes of a “Hawaii Five-O” rerun, then turned it off. Pulling the actor’s business card out of his sport jacket, Rocco reached for the phone.

“Pressure Point Productions,” said a young male voice.

“Yeah. Is Sean in? This is Rocco Klein.”

“One minute.”

Rocco cradled the phone along his jawline, held the business card in both hands, flipping it over, reading once again the scrawled promissory note on the back.

“Hi.” The new voice was female—husky and intimate.

“Hi. Who’s this?” Rocco leaned forward, his elbows propped on the desk blotter.

“This is Jackie. Can I help you?”

“Jackie, hi, this is Rocco Klein. Is Sean in?”

“Sorry, he’s not in right now. Can I help you with something?”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Sure do.”

“Great. I wasn’t sure, is ah … is Sean coming over to my office tonight? We left it kind of up in the air.”

“I, I don’t think so. I think he might have gone upstate.”

“Upstate?” Rocco was momentarily confused: upstate was a local euphemism for jail. “What, he’s on vacation?”

“No, he just … he should be back tomorrow.”

“Back where?”

“Hard to say. Do you want me to tell him anything?”

Rocco was tongue-tied for a moment. “Tell him I called, and to call me, OK?”

“What’s your number, Rocky?”

“Rocco, not Rocky.”

“Did I say Rocky?” She laughed, Rocco thinking, Real funny.

Just as he hung up, Vy’s voice came crackling over the desk intercom, telling him he had a visitor. Rocco hopped to it, a rush of blood making his temples pulse. It had to be him—Vy had that teasing note in her voice.

Rocco strode down the hallway making up tonight’s real-life research menu, so pumped about seeing the actor standing there that he looked right at the tiny, hollow-faced, pale woman slouched on the couch and shrugged to Vy.

“Where’d he go?”

“Where’d
who
go?” Vy squawked, giving Rocco a bug-eyed look.

It took a few moments before he understood that the woman was his visitor. “How are you?” he said tightly, stepping in front of her. The woman’s reddish-brown, broom-textured hair was gathered into a foot-long ponytail that sprouted out over her ear. She wore a tight pair of dungarees, neon pink socks and laceless tennis shoes. Underneath her denim jacket she wore a white T-shirt that bragged “Here’s the Beef,” but she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds.

“I know who shot that guy.” Her voice was raw and gravelly, her eyes sullen and steady.

“Good,” Rocco said mildly and extended his arm toward the interrogation room, bowing slightly.

She walked down the hallway swaybacked, leading with her pelvis like someone who was suffering from borderline starvation. Junkie, Rocco decided, or maybe an ex-junkie, since she seemed to be clean and her clothes were more or less color-coordinated.

In the interrogation room she sat with her elbows touching the insides of her thighs, already on her second cigarette before Rocco could even get her name spelled right.

Rocco sat at right angles to her, his legal pad on his crossed knee. He glanced at her name: Susan Phelan. “So Susan—”

“Suky, Suky.”

“So Suky, what can I do for You?”

“I told you.” She took a drag on a Newport, her fingertips reddish and nibbled. “I know who did that—who shot that guy.”

“What guy is that?”

“The Ahab’s.” She had smallish blue-gray teeth, and when she coughed into her fist Rocco quickly turned his head, pretending he heard someone knocking at a door.

“Ahab’s? Give me a name.”

“Almighty.” Her eyes shifted to the floor as she said it.

“Almighty…” Rocco cocked his head. “You mean
the
Almighty?”

“No, that’s his name.” Her eyes found Rocco’s face. “His real name is Gary White.”

Rocco wrote down the name, listening to her wet cough, gritting his teeth. “Almighty, Gary. You know where he lives?”

“Yeah. With me.”

Rocco was instantly skeptical. “And where’s that?”

“The Buckingham on Warton?”

“Uh-huh.” Rocco nodded mildly. The Buckingham was a ten-story flophouse across from the Dempsy Greyhound station.

“And how old would you say Almighty is, roughly?”

“Shit, I’ll tell you exactly. He’s twenty-eight.”

Rocco regarded her through narrowed eyes. “I’ll be back in a minute. You sure I can’t get you anything?”

She shrugged and Rocco returned to his desk. He called the Bureau of Criminal Identification and got Bobby Bones on the line.

“What can I do you for, Roc?”

“I need a look-up on a Gary White.”

There was silence on the line for a few seconds. “We got three—a twenty-eight, a fifty-one and a deceased.”

Rocco hesitated, bracing himself as if preparing to race. It was a point of pride for Bobby Bones to cut off an inquiry as soon as he got a name, then begin to spit back entire criminal histories before you could reach for a pad of paper. Bobby Bones had a photographic memory and was obsessed with the rap sheets of every criminal in Dempsy. He was able to retain thousands of numbers: addresses, social security, FBI, SBI, dockets, dates, dispositions, warrants—everything down to age, height and weight for roughly five thousand bad guys going back twenty-five years. The year before, when the computers had gone down, all the calls to BCI were rerouted to Bobby Bones’s mother’s house for thirty-six hours, to keep the wheels of justice rolling.

“I’ll take the twenty-eight. He got a moniker?”

“Almighty. Mostly small-time junkie shit these days—he likes to boost aspirin and steak, mainly. Got about a dozen trespass and petty-theft charges going back five years, some heavier shit before that. A real gnat.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Forty-four Monticello, Four F.”

“Yeah? I got the Buckingham.”

“Oh yeah?” Bones sounded insulted. “I think someone’s jerking your bird over there.”

“Maybe. Can you cut me a picture, send it over?”

“You got it.”

“Bones, what’s this guy, white or black?”

“Yomo. But he’s got a white girlfriend, Susan Phelan, Suky. Another fucking gnat. You want her sheet too?”

“Not now, maybe later.”

“Hey Roc, you know whose daughter she is? You remember Frog Phelan?”

“You’re shitting me.” Rocco felt depressed. “Jesus Christ. Poor Frog—another cop with a fucked-up kid. If they’re not shooting smack, they’re marrying Martians. She’s a junkie too, right? Ex-junkie? Why do they
do
that, these kids—Frog Phelan, hah? He was a good guy, a real nice guy.”

“He was a prick.” Bobby Bones put a shrug in his voice.

“Listen, this Susan, Suky, she got any outstanding warrants?”

“Petty shit. A two-year-old possession, like that.”

“Frog Phelan, hah? OK Bobby, be well.”

Rocco settled back down into his wooden chair in the interrogation room. There were four Newport butts in the tin dish in front of Suky now, and the room was adrift in smoke.

“Suky, how do you know Almighty did it?”

She looked away. “He told me.”

“When did he tell you?”

“You know, before. He showed me the gun and he said he was gonna kill that guy. Next thing somebody did it, right?”

She looked at the ashtray as she spoke, avoiding his eyes, Rocco thinking, This really stinks.

“Why’d he do it for?”

“Why?” she said, chewing on the word for a while. “He was in there buying a fish sandwich and he was paying in small change—you know, nickels and pennies’? And the manager was getting pissed because he was slowing down the line, giving him shit like, Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Then Almighty came up three cents short and the manager made some crack, so like everybody was laughing at him and then the manager wouldn’t let him slide for the three cents and you know he just made him feel bad, made him feel like
two
cents.”

Rocco couldn’t tell if the story was true. It seemed heartfelt despite her monotone delivery.

“And when was this?”

“The day before he showed me the gun. Like Wednesday? Yeah.” She nodded. “Wednesday.”

“Were you there when this happened?”

“Unh-uh. He just told me about it.”

“Can we talk to him? I’d really like to talk to him.”

“Hell yeah. You find him, you can talk to him.” She paused. “You
better
talk to him.”

“You know where he is now?”

“Minute to minute I can’t say, because I haven’t like seen him since when he showed me that gun.”

“What kind of gun was it? Do you remember?”

“What kind?” She shrugged. “I don’t know nothin’ about guns.”

Bullshit, Rocco told himself. Her old man was a cop. “OK, you think he’s home now?”

“Nah. I would try that field behind the methadone clinic. He might be there.”

“Off Cooper?”

“Yeah, he’s probably there.”

“Where’s he work?”

“He ain’t working now. He’s kind of sick.”

“Oh yeah?” Rocco assumed that sick meant the Virus.

“But when he’s well? When he can get hired? He works
hard.
”

Rocco was taken aback. Here she was trying to put her boyfriend away for thirty years, but she said it like Rocco shouldn’t think Almighty was a bum.

“Suky, how come you waited twenty hours to come in on this? I’m just curious.”

She looked at the ashtray again. “I just heard about it this afternoon.”

Another lie. “Did you know the guy that got shot?”

“Just from eating there sometimes.”

“How long you and Almighty been together?”

“Six, six and a half years.”

“Married or just…”

“He’s my husband—and my father.”

“Your father?”

“Of my baby.” Her face got far away and pained-looking. “How many kids you got?”

“One, a girl.”

Rocco drifted off for a moment, thinking about Erin, thinking of her married to an Almighty, shooting smack. Erin’s father was a cop too.

“Is he a good daddy, Almighty?”

She didn’t answer. Rocco drifted again: it wasn’t too late to become a good father. He just needed a little time to get his bearings, a little luck, and then it would be all downhill, he’d start taking Erin on long walks somewhere, pony rides, you name it.

“So he doesn’t do shit with the kid, right?”

She snapped back into focus, looked directly at Rocco, annoyed but calm. “Why are you asking all this?”

Momentarily flustered by her bluntness, Rocco changed his tack. “Suky, let me think out loud here for a second. I’m thinking, you live with the guy six years, he’s the father of your child, you only know the victim from eating, yet you’re coming in here on your own, you’re voluntarily putting this guy in the shit—and I’m talking an automatic thirty in, no parole if we get a conviction—and so
I
think, is there anything else going on here? Is this a personal beef? You know, like a lovers’ quarrel that’s a little out of hand? I know you got a warrant out on you. I mean, are you trying to work that off here maybe? Do some swapping? What’s up?”

Rocco stared at her, and she met his eyes with an unflinching steadiness. “I ain’t looking for nothin’,” she said, her voice low and flat. “You do to me whatever you want.”