Clockers (58 page)

Rocco nodded to himself, feeling vaguely humiliated now, trying to bail himself out. “One thing, though, that he was always proud of? He always said, No matter what, I always put food on the table—good times, bad times, there was food on the table.”

Rocco looked up and saw everyone watching him, heads bobbing in polite acknowledgment.

Patty brought the dessert—sliced papaya dipped in chocolate and frozen to the consistency of hard ice cream. The guests were all smiling and exclaiming, and then one of the women at the table began to talk about being a waitress, how bad she was at it, tripping over things, screwing up orders, but laughing about it. She was twenty-two and was really a painter, and this is what she happened to find herself doing to make ends meet. There was no despair in her voice, no sense of identification with the job. Listening to her, Rocco felt a stab of resentment at the open-endedness of her life, at her blissful assumption that she could play an infinite number of roles through the coming years.

Rocco withdrew again, thinking about that last long wrenching talk with his grandfather and about how when he was a kid his grandfather had withheld the true angle on things. Rocco had grown up with his grandfather’s stories, and they’d always centered on the defiant declarations, the successful showdowns—Sonny Marx don’t take no crap here, Sonny Marx don’t take no crap there. But Rocco had left the hospital that day thinking about the man pocketing baby chickens, begging Moskowitz for his job back, getting kicked in the ass by the detective, had left the hospital with the sickening intuition that all the stories were slanted halfway to pure bullshit, and that more than likely, the watermarks of this man’s life, this man that he had revered, had all been humiliations.

Erin started to cry behind her partition—a hesitant, barely conscious croak—and Rocco shot up as if she was shrieking in pain. “I’ll get her.” He held a hand out to Patty, snatched the vodka off the sideboard and disappeared behind the partition.

Erin was sitting up, blinking and frowning, on her way back down to sleep. Rocco lifted her out of the crib anyhow and carried her into the small guest room so they could lie down together. On his back, he closed his eyes and drifted, taking a nip now and then, some of the liquor trickling into his ear. He heard the conversation at the dinner table take on a reassuring rhythm of a good time had by all. Good food, good conversation. Good. Happy anniversary.

To celebrate, Rocco had bought Patty a three-hundred-dollar leather shoulder pouch that he had seen in the window of Crouch and Fitzgerald. It was similar to the one Sean Touhey carried around, and it cost Rocco half his paycheck. But Patty hadn’t gotten him a damn thing. She didn’t know you were supposed to exchange gifts on a wedding anniversary. Well, maybe you weren’t, what did he know? He lay there feeling sorry for himself, musing on how being around a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds made him act like a twelve-year-old, whereas when he was working across the river, truly
working,
he felt centered and unselfconscious, his deepest talents sometimes emerging quick and true.

He had felt that way the night before at that bar, Rudy’s, and now Rocco began running the Darryl Adams job through his head, thinking again about that truculent and eerily weightless kid Victor Dunham, about his hunch that the brothers were running a confession game on them. The case was definitely beginning to get inside him, which made Rocco feel both leery and primed. He had always believed that a major occupational hazard for a homicide investigator was catching a job that somehow got you by the balls, because when that happened a job could turn into a mission, and you could wind up humping on it, grinding your teeth about it for years, past the point of anybody’s caring sometimes including the family of the victim.

Mazilli had a mission like that: four years before, he had caught the murder of a twelve-year-old black kid by three equally young white kids, a meaningless impulsive stabbing. He knew who the perps were, and they knew he knew, but he couldn’t prove it so he had them monitored throughout the city. Whenever one of them was picked up for petty theft or drug possession, there wasn’t a cop in Dempsy who didn’t know to call Mazilli immediately so that he could come down to threaten, cajole and bargain with the kid to turn state’s evidence against the others. The perps were all sixteen now, a bad lot, each of them arrested at least three times since then. But so far none of them would rat out the others. Mazilli didn’t know how long it would take, how many arrests, how many bully sessions, but there was no doubt in his mind that someday one of these kids would get nailed for something bad enough to trade on, and when that happened—a year, two, five years from now he’d be right there.

Rocco had always felt sorry for guys who got sucked into missions like that, thought of them as modern-day Ancient Mariners, but now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe a mission was just the thing he needed to clean himself out—salvation through obsession, get that small wheel of gifts rolling, discover a way to live beyond the time clock.

This Darryl Adams job: maybe what interested him here was less about getting justice for Darryl Adams than getting it for Victor Dunham, and Rocco envisioned the day, a few weeks or months from now, when the brothers would switch places, when this kid Strike would be in County instead. Lying there, Rocco began spinning out strategies, angles of approach, game plans, thinking maybe Patty didn’t have to give him an anniversary present after all. Maybe he had just given one to himself.

Wednesday brought a new job, Mazilli’s catch, a white eighteen-year-old girl found nude in the St. Andrew’s Cemetery, her face punched in and a pocketknife rammed to the hilt in her chest. When Rocco walked into the office a little after four
P.M.
, Mazilli was already off in Jersey City, where the girl had lived, making the rounds with local detectives, trying to track down the boyfriend, the boyfriend’s best friend, the mother’s boyfriend and the uncle. A discarded gift box for a bottle of Boggs cranberry liqueur was found near the body, and the day tour had made the rounds of liquor stores in a five-block radius of the cemetery in the hopes that some salesclerk would ID the victim, but so far nothing doing. The liqueur was probably purchased the night before, which meant at least half the stores canvassed had different people working in them when the day tour came through, which meant that Rocco was supposed to do the canvass all over again tonight.

Rocco looked down at two photographs on his desk, the first a head shot of the girl. Her cheek rested on the clipped grass of the cemetery, eyes raccooned in blood, broken jaw ballooning blue. It had been hot the previous night, and maggot larvae, looking like a small cotton ball, were already nesting in the shell of her ear. The other picture, coaxed from the mother by local detectives, showed the girl sitting on her boyfriend’s lap on a steel-framed chair against a backdrop of cheap wood paneling. She was lean and bright-eyed, with dazzling teeth and black bangs, a little kohl around the eyes—a nice-looking girl. She sat with her arm behind the neck of the boyfriend, a thick-faced, ruddy blond with heavy lips and brow. The camera flash had given him red irises, making him look possessed, and Rocco found himself looking forward to meeting him, having a little chat.

The Ahab’s killing was already threatening to become yesterday’s news. Mazilli was completely off it now, and if Rocco intended to keep after it with any conviction, he’d have to make something happen fast. It was now five o’clock; according to the medical examiner, the girl was killed at about ten the night before. Rocco decided to start his canvass at seven, guessing the killer probably bought the booze around eight or nine and headed right for the cemetery.

Rocco grabbed a set of keys and headed out the door, figuring he had a couple of hours to kill, enough time to check out this kid Strike, get the smell of him and then decide whether to keep pushing his hunch or let it go. As he drove toward the projects, he recalled fragments of his humiliating ramble at the dinner table. The baby chickens story, Jesus Christ. He tried to remember if he had apologized to Patty or not, and then thought, Apologize for what?

He double-parked a half block from the Roosevelt benches. Even before he got out of the car, Rocco saw an unquiet stillness come over some of the people milling around, a side-mouthed irritation, and he knew that if he sat where he was for the next six hours, he would not see a single drug transaction, although his guess was that at least four or five kids were either holding or waiting for customers in order to scoop and serve from a central stash.

At first he thought the kid perched on the top slat of the center bench was Victor Dunham. Startled, Rocco wondered how the hell he had made bail. Rocco leaned forward a little, looked more closely and saw that it was actually Ronald Dunham. It was amazing how much the brothers resembled each other, not so much in actual looks as in carriage and aura—the same small, bird-boned frame, the same fretfully responsible expression, alert and sorrowful, as if they were in charge of overseeing some obscure but endless crisis.

He pulled the car right up to the benches, all eyes on him now, and got out with a little hop and a skip. But instead of walking directly to the dope crew, he made a detour to the looped chain surrounding the grass. That sharp eleven- or twelve-year-old boy was still sitting there, hunched over and rocking just like last time.

“I thought I told you to get out of town,” Rocco growled, giving him a beady stare. The boy turned his head, hiding his brights again, and then Rocco got down to business, hitching up his pants, straightening his tie and strolling to the bench. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable about going into this by himself to begin with, and when Ronald Dunham made a quick move to his waistband, Rocco had a real oh-shit moment. But then the kid pulled a key ring with a ridiculous number of keys from his front pocket and Rocco relaxed.

“How ya doin’, fellas?” Rocco stood in front of the center bench, bouncing on the balls of his feet, jangling the change in his pocket. Half a dozen teenagers stared at him, but no one answered.

Rocco turned to Victor’s brother. He refused to call him Strike: he hated using any of their street names, it was too much like kissing their ass.

“Are you Ronnie Dunham? I’m Rocco Klein from the Homicide squad. You got a minute for me?”

Arm high and curled in a slight crook, Rocco gestured for Strike to come down off the top slat, then walked him to the sidewalk, still in full view of his friends on the benches. It was a good spot for a casual grilling. By standing here, he would shut down all business, plus the kid would be off balance with everybody watching. Having an audience would be dangerous if the kid felt obliged to mouth off, put on a show, but Rocco didn’t think that would be a problem because this first time he’d play it in his nicest-guy-in-the-world mode, just two guys shooting the shit.

Now that both of them were standing more or less face-to-face, Strike looked even smaller, his eyes level with Rocco’s tie knot. His clothes were immaculate and modest, giving Rocco the impression of tight-assed tidiness.

Strike went up on tiptoe to jam his key ring back in his pants, and Rocco smiled at him.

“Jesus Christ, you’re about one key shy of a hardware store, there.”

The kid shrugged, waiting for real talk. He didn’t seem particularly nervous, more like distracted and vaguely irritated.

“Ronnie.” Rocco stepped toward him a few inches and spoke in a confidential murmur. “I’m working the Darryl Adams homicide and, ah, how’s your brother doing? He holding up in there?”

“I haven’t suh-seen him yet.”

“No? That’s a rough joint, County. You ever see that place?”

“No. I mean, ju-just like overnight aw-on a confusion.” A confusion: Rocco thinking, I love it. “Yeah, well, so you
know,
right?”

Strike didn’t answer. He looked over Rocco’s shoulder, into the distance. Rocco liked the stammer. He hoped it was a sign of distress and easy breakdown.

“How’s your mother doing?”

“Sh-she’s, you know.” The kid stopped, giving it just a quick huff of breath and a shrug, his feet shifting as if he had to pee, Rocco thinking, Guilty.

“Listen, I got to tell you, I’m not too happy with how things went down with your brother.” Rocco tried to sound apologetic, as if the whole thing was his fault. “I mean, he gave it up, he’s gonna swing for it, there’s nothing to do for that, but I dunno … I just don’t think it went down the way he said it did. Do you know what he said about it?”

Strike looked away. “How would I know? I wasn’t there.”

“Wasn’t where?”

The gaze swung back. Strike looked at him with barely concealed contempt for his heavy-handed ways. “Where he
talked
to you,” he said, speaking slowly in case Rocco didn’t get the message.

“Well, he’s claiming the guy jumped him out of the blue and it was self-defense.” Rocco sighed. “Between me and you, he sticks with that? He’s adding twenty years to his jail time. No fucking jury on earth’s gonna buy that, and it’s bugging the hell out of me because I know it’s just not what happened, and Jesus, your brother’s such a hard-working guy, you know?”

The kid’s mouth tightened and he studied the traffic.

“I mean
you
know, what the hell do I gotta tell
you
for? But let me ask you. What do
you
think happened? How the fuck did he get into this mess? You got any ideas?”

“I don’t know. He don’t lie, Victor, so like, maybe he-he’s sayin’ the truth.”

Rocco instantly regretted his strategy. He had told Strike too much, had given him Victor’s story to agree with and then clam up on. This kid’s no dope, he thought, and the stammer’s probably chronic, nothing to get excited about. Shit.

The kid’s eyes focused on something along the row of parked cars. Rocco turned to see the famous Erroll Barnes leaning against an old pea-green Le Baron, a brown bag pressed between his elbow and ribs.

“Hey-y, how ya doin’?” Rocco held up a hand in a half-salute. “Long time no see.”