Clockers (39 page)

“I got you?” Mazilli gave him a long, slow smile. Rodney made a full revolution, a distracted, limpy pirouette.

The store was quiet and still. For a moment they listened to the hum of the display cases.

“Can you work on it for me?” Mazilli asked gently.

Rodney looked away. “Sure.”

“‘Cause I can talk to Jo-Jo for you.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah?” Mazilli said.

“Yeah, awright. I’ll get my people on it.”

“And I’ll tell Jo-Jo you’re doing a thing for me, get him to lay off.”

“Yeah, gimme a day or two. I got my people out there.” Rodney grabbed the boxes, backing away.

“Good,” Mazilli said. “I’ll see you in a day or two.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You need a hand with that?” Rocco threw Rodney a warm smile but made no effort to move as Rodney pushed through the door.

“Bye, now,” Rocco said under his breath.

A customer came up to the liquor side of the store, and Rocco returned to his register to sell him a bottle of Cold Duck.

Mazilli watched the customer leave, then looked over at Rocco. “So what do you think?”

“I think he’s a motherfucking dope-dealing shit-skin cocksucker.” Rocco grinned, still seething over Rodney’s lecture.

Mazilli yawned. “C’mon, what do you think?”

“You
know
he knows something. He was doing fucking Buddy Rich on that carton there, you know, when you asked if he knew that kid?”

“Fucking Rodney,” Mazilli snorted, coming from behind the counter and aping Rodney’s gimpy pirouette.

“You wanna bring him in?” Rocco asked.

“Nah, it’s easier to work on him out here.”

“Who the fuck is Jo-Jo?”

“Kronic. The guy used to be in motorcycles?”

“The guy’s a thief, right?” Rocco knew Jo-Jo Kronic mainly from the papers. He had been acquitted on charges of extorting money from dope dealers five years before.

Mazilli shrugged. “Yeah, but he was McGoorty’s bodyguard for the campaign. The guy worked around the clock for free, plus he threw five large into the war chest. When McGoorty got in, he says, ‘What can I do for you, Jo-Jo?’ The guy asks for his own flying squad. They go out, they don’t answer to nobody but McGoorty. Do whatever the fuck they want—you know, street pops, raids, whatever.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You know how many Narcotics squads they got out there?” Mazilli counted on his fingers. “City, State, FBI, DEA, County, Housing—nobody telling anybody nothing, everybody banging into each other, arresting each other’s undercovers every time there’s a raid. And now here comes Jo-Jo fucking Kronic into the soup, and you
know
what he’s doing, right?”

“Going around making everybody pay up to stay in business.” Rocco drained his drink and poured another, this time without ice, past needing any.

“Jo-Jo’s got a boat? If it had numbers on the side it could’ve won the battle of Midway. And his new house? He’s half a mile down the road from Richard Nixon. And nobody can say shit, because he’s McGoorty’s man.”

“But he’s going after Rodney?” Rocco said.

Mazilli made a face. “Nah. I just made that up on the hoof. Rodney’s gonna come in here three days from now and I’m gonna say, ‘Hear anything?’ He’s gonna say, ‘I’m working on it, I’m working on it.’ I’m gonna say, ‘Yeah? Me too.’ Fuck him. I’ll just start dropping by his craps garage later in the week, throw his action off a little. He’ll tell me something good.”

“Fucking prick. When you were in back? This guy buys his fifth can of Bud, I tell him to spring for a six-pack, you know, get with the program? Fucking Rodney starts giving me this speech about the people’s street bar, how
I’m
the fucking bartender. Can you believe the balls on him?”

“Yeah, well, he’s kind of right.”

“Fuck you too,” Rocco said, anger coming into his face again. “That’s the problem with these people, they don’t plan ahead.”

“Is that the problem?” Mazilli hiked an eyebrow.

“‘He’s kind of right,’” Rocco muttered, feeling as if he’d just flunked a wisdom test.

The ten-year-old came into the store for the third time, walking slowly now, heading for Mazilli’s counter.

“Kools,” he said, spilling a dollar and change on the counter. The boy’s lip was swollen and bloody. Rocco assumed that someone had cracked him good for coming home without the lottery tickets.

Rocco felt a sharp twinge of sympathy, imagined walking the boy home and tuning up whatever prick did the deed, but when their eyes met, he saw in the boy a look of pure hatred, as if it was Rocco’s fault that he’d been smacked. Suddenly Rocco was glad to live in New York, glad to be married and have his own kid, his own family way out of town. It was time to chuck this life, with its Jo-Jos and Rodneys, its bloody burning children and walking-dead parents, just kick dirt over the whole show, like a cat burying its shit. Retirement. It was just a word, not a medical condition. But where the fuck was Sean Touhey?

The Bud man came up to buy his sixth can, glaring at Rocco too, daring him to say something, but Rocco pointedly avoided his eyes until he rang up the sale.

“You have a nice night now,” Rocco said.

The guy stood there wanting to say something, looking hot, but he made it all the way to the screen door before he turned back and started barking.

“I buy a motherfuckin’ six-pack, sit out there, how many goddamn beers you think
I’m
gonna have, and how many beers you think I’m gonna get
mooched
on, stupid.” The guy stalked out under the streetlights.

“When you’re right, you’re right.” Rocco said to the screen door. He gulped down his drink and tossed the cup, then cracked the register and paid himself fortv-three dollars, one for each year of his life.

“I’m out of here,” he announced to Mazilli.

“C’mon, another half hour,” Mazilli whined, glancing at his wrist-watch.

“Hey, get your pal
Rod
ney to cover.”

“I don’t believe this.” Mazilli looked both amused and annoyed as Rocco walked out into the night, bumping into one of the displaced dealers, all of whom were strolling back to where the cops had stood until ten minutes before.

Rocco fully intended to make it straight home to Patty from Mazilli’s store, but at the approach to the Holland Tunnel he pulled over and stopped at a bar in a gentrified section of Jersey City, telling himself that he was waiting for the toll-booth lines to thin out.

The bar had a brand-new antique look, oak and brass and hanging plants, with nineteenth-century advertisements for foot powders and neuralgia cures framed on the walls.

Rocco weaved his way through a flush-faced gaggle of young stockbroker types hoisting oversize cans of Foster Lager and booing Darryl Strawberry on the wall-mounted television. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a Cape Codder, deciding that since he was paying for it, this was his first real drink of the night. Next to him sat a woman who looked about Patty’s age, and Rocco furtively studied her reflection in the bar mirror as he took the first tart sip of his drink.

She was tall and thin, nice-looking, and she wore a derby, dungarees and a satin-backed brocade vest. Reflexively Rocco felt obliged to imagine picking her up, but he had never in the last twenty-five years figured out how to start up a conversation with a woman at a bar that didn’t sound moronic. She abruptly solved that one for him by simply catching his eye in the mirror, smiling and saying “Hi,” something he had never thought of trying in a quarter century of racking his brains in the semidarkness.

Unnerved, Rocco talked directly into the mirror. “Good, and you?”

“I’ve been better.” She turned to him now, some kind of invitation in the casual candidness of her remark.

“Oh yeah?” Rocco forced himself to face her.

“Rough night in Jericho,” she said, and Rocco was drawn to the offbeat tone of her line. He stole a peek at her hand on the bar, the graceful arches of her bent fingers, the nibbled edges of her nails. He hadn’t so much as kissed another woman since that day he had forced his way into Patty’s apartment looking for a dead baby.

She followed his eyes to her hand, watched it with him for a moment, then let it slide an inch or two in his direction.

“Yup.” Rocco hissed at his drink through bared teeth. Feeling the need to slow this down, he rose from the bar. “Excuse me a second.”

Weaving his way through the rowdy young brokers, who were now bellowing the “Jetsons” theme song in each other’s faces, Rocco made his way to a phone and dialed home. He hung up as soon as he heard Patty say hello.

What would he say to her? That he was coming home? She knew that. Stop me before I fuck somebody? That really wasn’t a possibility; he could barely work up the inspiration to flirt.

Rocco stood before the phone, his hand on the hung receiver, trying to get his bearings, figure out how to get fed right now without hurting himself. Looking back through the drunken brokers to the bar, he saw that the girl was watching him through the mirror. Blindly he started to dial again.

Since the Ahab’s shooting the previous night, the urge to call Sean Touhey had become a nearly chemical impulse. It was just like a craving for alcohol or sugar: whenever he had felt anxious or depressed in the last few days, he would unthinkingly reach for the phone. And it didn’t seem to make a difference whether anyone picked up or not. He was more addicted to the gesture, to the ritual, than to anything involving true contact.

The actor answered on the first ring, and Rocco was so startled to get a voice on the line that he barked, “Who’s this.” Touhey said “Sean!” as if he had been caught at something.

“Sean! Hi, sorry, this is Rocco, man.” Rocco looked at his watch: almost midnight.

“Rocco.” Touhey’s voice was flat and queasy.

“Yeah, hi—how you doing? You coming in?” Rocco said impulsively, deciding to play it as if he was still sitting at his desk in the Homicide office. He cupped the mouthpiece to muffle the singing by the bar.

“Coming in?” the actor repeated weakly.

“Yeah.” Rocco’s face was radiant with shame. “I got a murderer for you. He’s right in the next room. The kid who did the job you saw. Remember? He’s right here.” Rocco could hear the actor breathing, sense his feeling of being cornered, but he plowed ahead. “Sean, listen. I’ll come pick you up. I could be there in half an hour, OK? You’ll be ready for me? ‘Cause the guy’s right here, you know?” Rocco put a hand to his forehead and it came away damp. He saw the girl at the bar talking to another guy about half Rocco’s age, giving him the same inviting smile.

“Rocco…” Touhey spoke his name as if something significant would follow, but then he exhaled heavily and said, “Hang on.”

Rocco listened to the muffled rustling of a smothered receiver before a husky-voiced woman came on the line.

“Hi, Rocco. This is Jackie, remember me?”

“Hey Jackie, how are you? So, what do you guys got there, like a combination apartment-office?” Rocco heard himself babbling. “I mean, I was like amazed anybody answered the phone, you know? I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“Yeah, it’s an apartment,” she answered patiently.

“I mean, no offense, it’s none of my business. I was just surprised because—”

“Listen, Rocco,” she cut him off, “I have to tell you something. Sean’s decided to shelve the police movie for now.”

Rocco experienced a sizzling buzz of disappointment.

“How come?” He scanned the bar—the girl was gone.

“Well, something came up.”

“Is it something I did?” He tried for a jokey, self-mocking tone but felt disgusted by his own question.

“No, no” Jackie said, “you’re great, you’re great. It’s just that the financing came through for another project that’s been very close to Sean’s heart for six years, and out of the blue it came together and, you know, when the light turns green, you go.”

“Six years.” Rocco took a pen out of the inside of his sport jacket and drew a six on the side of the phone enclosure, then a line of sixes. He felt dead calm now.

“It’s about the earth.”

“The earth. What do you mean, the planet?”

“You know, about pollution.”

“Great.”

“It’s Sean’s passion.”

A recorded voice asked for a quarter. Rocco fed in all his change without counting it.

“Rocco, could you wait a minute? Wait.” There was more muzzled rustling, and when Jackie came back on, her voice was quieter, more personal. “Sean just left the room, so let me be up front with you while I can, OK?”

“Shoot,” Rocco said.

“Rocco, Sean’s A.A. He’s been sober for five years.”

“Yeah?” He waited for the punch line.

“What the hell did you get him so wasted for?”

Rocco palmed his forehead. “Oh, Christ.”

“Rocco, he’s spent the last two days going to meetings—and I’m talking five a
day.
He’s scared to death. You go on a bender after all those years, it’s like all that sober time never was. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“Why didn’t he say something?”

“Well, I guess you showed him some heavy stuff and, I dunno, he didn’t want—he wanted you to think—you understand, you’re a guy.”

“Listen, let me talk to him.”

“He left.”

“He
left?
I was just talking to him. He just gave you the phone and left in the middle of a conversation?”

“Rocco, he can’t do you, he can’t be
around
you.”

“This is not right.”

“I know, I know.”

“This is not … A guy should open his mouth and say stuff at the
time,
you know? Say, ‘Hey, I’m in A.A.,’ something … this is not my fault. This is
bull
shit.” Rocco didn’t care about the movie right now. He was momentarily overwhelmed by the feeling that he had fallen into a trap laid by the actor’s weakness of character.

“I know, I know.” She sighed.

Rocco held the receiver to his chest for a moment, feeling a mixture of panic and relief, telling himself this was all for the better, that he somehow deserved this for betraying his own integrity and becoming a celebrity kiss-ass.

“I know, Rocco,” Jackie said again.