Clockers (48 page)

Strike looked back at Andre, who nodded primly for him to proceed.

“I want some mattresses,” Strike said, the craving still in his guts: Who’d steal wall-to-wall carpeting from you?

“Mattresses.” The salesman bobbed his head, snapped his fingers in the air for them to follow and brought them to the rear wall.

“Size?”

Strike looked to Andre, who spread his hands wide.

“Full. And just ma-mattresses, no box springs or nothin.”

“Mattresses. More than one?”

Andre held up ten fingers.

“Like nine.”

“Nine. What’s this, for a school?”

“Yeah, it’s for kids.” Strike felt good when he said that; he was starting to enjoy this. Something bright orange caught his eye over by the couches and he wanted it, whatever it was.

“Well, if it’s for kids, let me see what I can do for you.” The salesclerk pulled a wafer-thin calculator out of his shirt pocket and started poking. “What are you, City?”

“Unh-uh.” Strike’s attention strayed to a twin mattress, outer-space blue with exploding rocket ships and asteroids. He thought of Tyrone: maybe he needed a mattress too.

“Are you tax-exempt?”

Strike hesitated, not sure what that meant.

Andre laughed. “Yeah, he’s kind of tax-exempt.”

“Normally it’s sixty for a full, but for nine? For what you’re doing for the kids? Forty-five, how’s that sound?”

“Yeah, OK.” Strike wondered what the salesman thought they were doing for the kids, but obviously the guy assumed it was something positive. Strike liked that. If he thought about it, he had always liked kids. He was good with kids. Like Jose—getting Jose to bed in Crystal’s house. Rodney had once said that Whitney Houston was dead-on when she sang, “The children are the future.”

“I say forty-five, I’m assuming you’re talking cash, because credit cards, checks”—the salesman made a clicking noise—“you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, cash, cash,” Strike said, thinking someday he’d work with kids, help kids, thinking of Victor’s boys, turning that image off real quick, thinking of Tyrone—Tyrone looking up to him,
all
kids looking up to him, the way they looked up to Wayne today. But Wayne was about War; Strike would be about Peace.

The salesman asked for a fifty percent deposit, but Andre jumped in to say they’d pay for it all now, giving Strike a look that made it clear he didn’t want to hunt him down the next week in order to get the rest of the money. Strike didn’t care; surrounded by all this fresh merchandise, he was lost in an image of Whitney Houston singing “The Children Are the Future,” imagining himself being mobbed by adoring kids. He felt loose and generous. Even the overheated plastic lost its stench. It was now the scent of newness, of variety, of options.

***

Andre pulled up to the benches, threw the Jeep into park and sat slouched in the driver’s seat, smiling through his goatee.

“You know what we gonna do next week?”

“Aw c’mon, Ah-Andre. That’s it, man.”

“We gonna clean out that space down there. Get rid of that piss stink.”

“Oh yeah?” Strike turned his head away, smiling, thinking that he had never run from cops in his life, but if Andre came after him for
that…

Strike took the books from his lap and gave them a last sniff for that smell of newness before jamming them between the dashboard and the window.

“OK, Andre.” He moved to open the door.

“What are you doin’?” Andre’s voice went high.

“What?” Strike had one foot on the ground.

“Those books are for
you.
They a thank-you present/ram yourself
to
yourself.”

Andre palmed all eleven and dropped them back on Strike’s lap. He put out his hand. “You did good today.”

Strike turned away, fighting down another smile. “Everybody likes Ah-Andre, ‘cause Andre for the people.” He tried to put a sarcastic spin on it, tried not to admit to himself that this was about as happy and hopeful as it ever got for him.

18

WALKING
into the office on Monday afternoon, Rocco saw an article on the arrest in the Darryl Adams job pinned to the bulletin board. Rocco’s name was mentioned twice. Usually that gave him a little kick, but this time the article served to remind him of how unnerving and frustrating the interrogation had been.

The night before, when he had handed Victor Dunham over to County, Rocco had reached out to one of the ranking correction officers, a sergeant named Frank Lopez, and asked him to keep an eye on the kid. Over the years, Rocco would occasionally call Lopez or some other buddy on the inside and request that an incoming mutt be put in a cell with a certain informer, or that a particularly nasty scumbag be assigned a nightmare roommate, but last night was the first time Rocco had ever asked a CO to do some babysitting for him and watch a confessed murderer’s back. Given Victor’s background, it had seemed like the decent thing to do.

On the way to dinner with Mazilli, Rocco parked for a minute outside the Municipal Court and went downstairs to the Bureau of Criminal Identification to get a copy of Dunham’s pedigree for the homicide folder. BCI was in the basement of the court building, below the ground-level police garage. It was a gloomy antique of an office, with mint-green walls, oily wainscoting and an ancient scale that had once taken the height and weight of young punks like Carmine Galante, Frank Costello and Longy Zwillman in the days when “consorting with known Italians” was a criminal offense on the Dempsy books.

Rocco walked up to the waist-high counter that divided the holding cells and fingerprinting station from a cluster of battered desks and filing cabinets. He gave a short salute to Bobby Bones. The ID King was holding down the fort solo, sitting behind a typewriter and eating a sandwich.

Bones met Rocco belly-to-belly across the divider and braced himself like a goalie. “Hit me.”

“Victor Dunham.”

The crow’s feet at the corners of Bones’s eyes turned to starbursts. “Who?” His mouth hung open, a crescent of yellow cheese plastered along his jaw.

“Victor Dunham.”

Bones reared back and smoothed his hair. “He got a moniker?”

Rocco shrugged.

“Dunham, Dunham … Victor Dunham … You sure he’s Dempsy?”

“Yup.”

Bones looked lost. “You sure that’s his name?” Rocco scratched his jaw. “Do me two favors, OK?”

“Sure.”

“Number one, look it up in the files, OK?”

“Yeah, well of course,” Bones said unhappily.

“Number two, take that fucking piece of cheese off your face.”

Bones moved toward a six-foot-high cabinet, fingers twitching at his hips like a gunslinger. “Dunham…”

“Look under D.” Rocco leaned forward on the counter. “Please.”

“How about a
Ronald
Dunham?” Bones offered, sounding like a desperate salesman. “I got a Ronald Dunham.”

“Please.”

Hissing in defeat, Bones finally went into a drawer and pulled out a file card. “Son of a bitch.” He glared at it, committing it to memory. “Victor Dunham … who the fuck is
this
prick?”

Rocco and Mazilli sat over screwdrivers and a pizza, Rocco reading a printout of Victor Dunham’s sheet. It contained only one charge, assault on a police officer, which was downgraded to a disorderly person and dismissed a month later in Municipal Court. The arrest report consisted of a perfunctory paragraph about the kid assaulting Thumper, referred to here as P.O. Michael Carney, and hindering him in the performance of his duties. Rocco read into what was there and not there—nothing about possession of drugs, no language like “in the commission of a crime” or “in the company of,” meaning Victor wasn’t in a fight or part of a gang. Whatever went down was between Thumper and the kid, and since it was downgraded to a disorderly person and ultimately thrown out Victor had probably filed a countercharge, claiming that it was Thumper who was out of line, the two charges then canceling each other out.

Rocco remembered the kid’s comment in the car about the incident ^- “arrested for eye contact,” he’d said—and made a mental note to ask what had happened next time he ran into Thumper.

Rocco pulled another wedge off the pie and said, “When do we get the ballistics back on that gun yesterday, in like two weeks?”

“Ten days, two weeks, like that,” Mazilli said.

“You know what I want to do? Let’s go over to the kid’s house, talk to his old lady, make sure he’s not some whack job who confesses to everything like a hobby.”

Mazilli waved Rocco away. “He did it. Don’t get crazy on me here.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just, you know, that confession reads like such horseshit. If the gun comes back clean, plus we find out he once confessed for snatching Judge Crater, I’m gonna feel like a fucking horse’s ass.” Rocco put a little pleading in his voice. He always had to song-and-dance Mazilli into doing any kind of work on a case once they had the perp locked up.

Looking sour, Mazilli waved again. “It’s on you.”

Rocco did the driving, and thirty minutes later they pulled up alongside the benches of the Roosevelt Houses. It was a balmy, starry night and nearly a hundred people were hanging out, every one of them taking note of the two Homicides in the Chevy, some pointedly looking away, others muttering or making side-mouthed comments.

“They’re gonna trash the fucking car,” Rocco said. “Maybe we should go in with Housing.”

“C’mon.” Mazilli got out and walked directly to the bench, picking out a kid he knew from his liquor store. “What’s your name again?”

“Futon.” The kid wore aqua headphones and was eating Gummi Bears out of a jar. He looked to his friends on the bench, all of whom had suddenly become stony and distant. One kid eased off the slats and casually strolled away. Probably holding, thought Rocco, coming up behind Mazilli.

“Where you live, Futon?” Mazilli squinted, half smiling.

“Here.” He raised a limp hand at 6 Weehawken.

“What floor?”

“Three.”

Mazilli scanned the third-floor windows, then looked back at the car.

“Who’s your mother, Futon?”

“Doreen Owens.”

“Doreen Owens.” Mazilli nodded as if he knew who she was. “You know me, right?”

“You the Homicide from the store.”

“Watch the car for me.”

“I might have to go.” He stole a peek at his friends again. Rocco could hear the insect tinniness of the music leaking out of the headphones.

“Just watch the car for me,” Mazilli said softly, then walked away before the kid could protest.

Making his way across the esplanade from the benches, Rocco saw that the news of their arrival preceded them by about a hundred yards; everybody seemed to be looking in their direction even before they came into view. A dust cloud of children followed them. It began with two or three kids from the benches and picked up new members along the way, and by the time the men arrived at Victor Dunham’s building, enough kids skipped and chattered in their wake to make Rocco feel like the Pied Piper.

One of the kids from the parade entered the building with Rocco and Mazilli and stood by the elevators. He was a boy of about twelve, handsome and serious-looking, and when he stepped into the elevator with them but didn’t press for a floor, Rocco figured that someone had sent him to find out where they were going. As the car began its slow, clanky ride to eleven, Rocco studied the boy, who in turn studied the warped floor.

“Where
you
going?” Rocco asked.

“My friend’s house.” His voice was shy and far away.

“You didn’t push his floor.”

The boy hesitated, then pushed ten.

“You almost took an extra ride for nothing, see?”

When the elevator opened at ten, Rocco barked, “Hey!”

Poised for flight, the boy turned to Rocco with one hand holding the elevator door.

“Who’s Mister Big?” Rocco growled, playing the hard guy in a B movie. To Rocco’s surprise the boy got the joke, his face flattening in pleasure for a second before running off down the hallway.

“Nice kid.” Rocco held the elevator door open until he heard a heavy steel door slam down the hall. The boy was taking the stairway back to the street, to report to whoever sent him.

Rocco and Mazilli walked down the musky, graffiti-scorched hallway to apartment 11G. Rocco hit the bell a few times before hearing a husky voice say ”
Who
…” above the TV noise from within.

“How ya doing. It’s Rocco Klein, prosecutor’s office,” he shouted, standing on tiptoes and fingering his shield in its billfold.

An overweight, soft-faced girl of about nineteen opened the door and looked at Rocco heavily, ignoring his shield.

“Are you ShaRon?”

She didn’t answer, just walked back into the living room and left the door open for them. After sitting down on the edge of an easy chair, she glued her eyes to the screen of a console television.

Mazilli came in behind Rocco and closed the door. A baby and a little boy slept on an open convertible sofa next to the television, and at the far end of the living room, in the doorless archway to the tiny kitchen, an older woman stood with her back to them, working briskly over an ironing board.

Rocco moved between the girl and the television. “You’re ShaRon, right?”

She nodded blindly, delicately scratching the rim of her nostrils with a pinkie nail.

Rocco moved a step toward the woman ironing shirts and raised his voice. “Are you Mrs. Dunham?”

The woman nodded but didn’t turn to face them.

Rocco spoke to the girl again. “Can we sit down for a minute? Tell you what we’re here for?”

“Uh-huh,” ShaRon grunted without suggesting where. They sidestepped the sofa and slid into two chairs at a small dining table set flush against a living room wall, right behind the older woman and her ironing board.

Rocco was impressed with the apartment; it was cramped but clean. The open convertible took up the heart of the living room, and the sofa pillows stacked alongside the wall were sheathed in clear vinyl, as were three lampshades, ShaRon’s easy chair and the VCR on top of the TV. The dining table was already laid out for tomorrow’s breakfast—cereal bowls and silverware on plastic placemats—and the kitchen beyond the ironing board had an air of scoured spotlessness.