Clockers (72 page)

She said nothing. Exasperated, Rocco drew her a picture with giant crayons. “Maybe there was someone he let down, someone he was supposed to be a role model for, and maybe this person didn’t turn out so good, and maybe Victor felt like it was
his
fault that this other person turned out this way. And then by making this incredible sacrifice, he’d be giving this other kid one more chance to straighten out his life, you know?”

Rocco looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to punch in the name. Finally she met his eyes. “I know he told you that boy attacked him. I don’t see why you don’t believe him.”

Running out of guile, feeling he had nothing to lose now, Rocco decided to drop it right in her lap. “Well, look … I thought I was coming over here with some good news but, ah, do you know what the word on the street is about this?”

“I’m not
about
the street,” she said, fast and angry.

“Yeah, well, the word on the street is that Victor is taking the weight on this for his brother. For Ronnie.”

The woman smiled, the first smile Rocco had ever seen from her.

“Why are you smiling?”

Her voice became almost conversational. “Well, now wait a minute. I’m not gonna pretend like I don’t know what he’s
doing
out there, but”—she gave him a dry laugh—“Ronald has his limitations.”

“And what does
he
have to say about what happened? Did you talk to him?”

Her hands stopped moving, her eyes flew up, and then her words came in such a rush that Rocco imagined that someone else had just inhabited her body. “Let me tell you, about a year ago? Ronald, he started getting into that business down there. I called him out on it, he says to me, ‘But Mommy, I’m making it the only way they
let
a black man make it,’ and I said, I don’t wanna
hear
that garbage. Who do you think you’re talking to with that? Your brother ain’t doin’ that, your father didn’t do that.’ He says to me, ‘Well, that was their prerogative. Besides, Victor ain’t making it, he just working himself down, he ain’t goin’ nowhere, that ain’t
making
it,’ and I said, ‘Well, do you really consider selling that poison making it?’ And I remember he couldn’t even look me in the eye. He just said, ‘I just want to make enough money to get out of here, then I’m out of it ‘ and I said to him ‘Oh yeah? How much money is
enough?
What do you mean by enough … How long do you think Rodney Little been at it, how many years, how much money do you think Rodney Little has made, and
he
can’t get out of it, he never seen enough, and I bet you he always talks about getting out, always talks about enough, huh?’ See, I said that to him because I know Rodney last year got to be like a father to him because their real father died when they were little, and I should have never let him go to work in that candy store, but my boys always worked, both of them, ever since they were fifteen, sixteen. But Rodney takes advantage of these—some of these kids without fathers. Rodney gets into their heads, so I stayed on him that time because I know all that ‘I’m making it the only way a black man can make it’ nonsense that’s just Rodney inside his head, and I told him, T don’t want you living in this house if you’re out there doing that’ and he says to me ‘Mommy let me tell You something Victor’s always talking about moving out. Victor’s got six thousand dollars saved up to move it took him two years and two jobs I got me six thousand dollars in a
month:
I say to him ‘But someone come up to Victor ask him “What did you do for that money?” Victor says “I manage a restaurant I do security work” Victor can answer with his head high because he didn’t hurt nobody to make it ‘ Ronald says to me ‘I never forced nothing on nobody.‘I say,‘Ronald, look me in the eye and tell me what you do What’s its’
name
Say it Say it out loud. What do you do? Give me its
name.
‘ He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t look me in the eye and he couldn’t say it. He just got up, said, ‘Mommy, next time I come into this house, I’m gonna’ be out of it. I’m gonna be flush and legitimate. I’m gonna come up and take you away from here, take
all
a you, and Victor’s still gonna be counting his pennies.’ And I just said to him, ‘You ain’t takin’ me
no
where on drug-bought money,’ and that was that.”

She paused, exhaling slowly and passing the heel of her hand under a dry eye. “That was the last time I talked to him, and I won’t even walk out that end of the projects, because I know he’s out there doin’ his business, and I don’t ever want to
see
that. He’s a young man and maybe he’s got to do his young man things, make his young man mistakes, and I hope one of those mistakes don’t kill him. But he’s also a young man on his own now, and I can’t take responsibility for his decisions anymore. I pray he’ll come back to himself one day, but…”

Gesturing, she accidentally backhanded a few open-ended coin rolls, spilling the money back on the table. She took in the damage and, without blinking, began to restack the pennies and dimes.

Rocco watched her, confounded: Not two words in defense of Victor, but this other little scumbag rates a whole speech.

She took another deep breath. “What I’m trying to say to you is, I know Ronald’s out there doing bad things.
He
knows he’s doin’ bad things, because he was brought up in this house, and that is causing him no end of pain out there. But one thing … Ronald, he might be an angry kid, he
is
an angry kid, but he ain’t no killer. This I would lay my life on.”

“Do you think Victor’s a killer?”

“Let me ask you something,” she said, nodding to Rocco’s sport jacket. “You carry that gun. Someone’s coming up on you in a alley or out of the dark. You go to defend yourself and you shoot that person.
You.
“ She pointed at Rocco. “Does that make you a killer?”

Rocco was so baffled by this woman that for a moment he stared at her as if taking her question seriously. “Can I ask you something? And I hope I’m not out of line here, but … I asked you if you talked to Ronald, to Strike, about this, and you come back at me with this, this long, heartfelt candidness, telling me all about him, how he’s a good kid in a bad head and all, defending him—well, not defending,
explaining
him. And I also know that last year when Victor got into that stupid shoving match with the Housing cop? I know how you went to bat for him, how you literally took your life in your hands in the street, in the police station. I mean, I know you’re a fighter, a striver, I can tell, and that thing last year came to nothing, it was a glorified shoving match, but there you were, like a tiger for your son. But that was nothing, this is
homicide,
and I’m the arresting officer, I’m not Thumper. This is
me,
and I’m coming to you. I’m saying I think your son Victor is innocent. I’m on
your
side…”

Rocco paused, his arms spread in bewilderment. “Mrs. Dunham, the stakes are so high. He could go to jail for thirty years on this. Where
are
you…”

She was staring at Rocco’s shirt, her mind miles away, and each word came out chiseled and heavy. “Victor is a beautiful, hardworking boy. He don’t lie. If he
said
he did it, then he
did
it. If he
said
it came about the way it came about, then that’s what happened. He told you it was self-defense…” Her eyes came up at him with a burning dryness much more terrible than tears. “Why don’t you just believe him?”

In the long silence that followed, Rocco heard the echoing steps of her grandchildren walking to the apartment from the elevator. The idea of continuing this conversation with the apartment filled with children struck him as unbearable, and Rocco rose, frowning with frustration. He dropped his calling card on the table, thanked her for the cake and her time, and left her to her stacking, her fingers flying with the intimate precision of a lifelong weaver working her loom.

Standing near Big Chief, who was studying an apartment layout for the “H” line in the O’Brien Houses, Rocco slipped on a borrowed bulletproof vest, a white one, with a drawing of a samurai across the chest. He was surprised at how light it felt. Either the vests had been improved since the last time he needed to wear one or he had gotten that much more padded himself.

“Get us the
Hat,
“ Thumper drawled as he stuck two light bulbs in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and jammed the flat half deep into the back of his pants. Some people would sit in the dark for six months before they’d replace a bulb, and the last thing a cop wanted to do after plowing through an apartment door was search a bedroom by flashlight.

The Fury office was in the midst of a feeding frenzy. The four Housing cops, Mazilli and two Jersey City detectives—everybody was dribbling Drake’s cakes over their vests, drinking cold coffee or flat soda, grabbing petrified slices of Swiss cheese, eating anything, Rocco the only one whose anticipation-pump blocked his appetite.

One of the Jersey City detectives flipped through a magazine from the milk crate of porn, then ran off to the John down the hall. Crunch followed after him to piss for the third time in an hour as Big Chief folded up and packed the Rabbit, a ten-pound pneumatic crowbar that could pop a door off a frame, make it fly straight back five feet before it even fell.

“Get us the
Hat!
“ Smurf readjusted the Velcro cinches on his vest, which was white like Rocco’s, this one adorned with a grinning skull pierced by a hypodermic needle from crown to jawbone. Rocco knew they’d all get to the heart medicine a little early tonight; that was part of the ritual anytime they had to serve paper, go through a door. So he went to the refrigerator and chugged down a pint of half-and-half to coat his stomach for the celebration to come.

It was eight o’clock, about four hours since his visit with Victor’s mother. Bugged all afternoon by the mystery of the Dunham brothers, Rocco had felt grateful for the call to action when it came through. These days, he rarely did any physical or even remotely dangerous police work, and tonight’s job seemed just the thing to cleanse his blood of too many dinners, too many drinks and not enough fear. For ten years, first as a uniform and then as an anticrime cop, Rocco got a daily jolt of adrenaline; now, he had almost forgotten what that rush was like.

The Jersey City detectives had come to Dempsy with an arrest warrant for one Moses Worthy. Worthy had murdered Daniel Burgos, a k a Papi, and wounded Jose Obregon—the survivor giving up the shooter from his Bronx hospital bed in exchange for downgrading an attempted homicide charge that he was facing himself. Jersey City had caught the homicide even though Burgos had died three feet over the state line on the New York side of the Holland Tunnel; since the victim was traveling from New Jersey, where the crime had obviously been committed, New York had thrown the case back across the river. When the Jersey City cops got to work, they found two sets of blood stains in the dead man’s car, suggesting that the victim had not been alone when he was shot. Within forty-eight hours, the detectives had traced Burgos, a Dominican kilo dealer, back to his Bronx neighborhood and found his bodyguard, Obregon, recovering in a nearby hospital from what he’d claimed were self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the lower back. After a little bargaining, Obregon gave up a street name for the shooter_Buddha Hat_and a crime scene location, off Cooper Street by Kelso Salvage, city of Dempsy.

Armed with only a moniker, the Jersey City detectives then went to Dempsy BCI, where they were the beneficiaries of the compulsive work habits of Bobby Bones, the ID King. Never having spent any time in County, even on an overnight, Buddha Hat shouldn’t have had a mug shot on file. In fact, there was only one charge on his sheet: a motorcycle cop had stopped him one night six months before on suspicion of being a nineteen-year-old black kid driving a brand-new Volvo. The cop ran a radio check right on the street, which yielded a contempt of court warrant for a failure to pay thirteen hundred dollars in parking tickets. The cop took him down to BCI for processing, and when bail was set at the cost of the parking tickets, Buddha Hat produced the money after making a phone call. But then Bobby Bones happened to look up from his typewriter as Buddha Hat was heading for the door. Knowing all about the Hat and his reputation as a drug enforcer for Champ, Bones detained him for prints and a mug shot anyhow, the ID King’s dream being to create a jacket for every adult male in the city.

Earlier today, the Jersey City detectives had offered up their moniker and made Bobby Bones’s week. They walked out of BCI with Moses Worthy’s picture and the mug shots of five other locals who looked vaguely like him, got Obregon to pick Buddha Hat out of the photo array, then traveled back to Dempsy BCI to get an arrest warrant. And two hours ago they had walked into Dempsy Homicide, looking for some help on the arrest, and found Mazilli and Rocco. Mazilli, who also knew all about the Hat, came up with the idea of going in with the Fury, since O’Brien was their domain and the herd hanging around outside the building would be fooled into thinking it was just another Fury roll.

The preparations for the raid complete, Rocco and the others left the office. They took two cars, both Fury bombs, with the Housing cops divided up and fronting the four sport jackets to mask the mission. The plan was to drive up on either side of the breezeway of Buddha Hat’s building, enter front and rear, and take separate stairways to make everybody in the lobby think it was just a vertical pincers patrol. They would then rendezvous at the third-floor elevator bank and ride up to twelve, where the Hat lived with his grandmother.

Rocco rode with Big Chief, Thumper and Mazilli, their car leading the war party to the crest of the hill overlooking the projects. Everybody looked down on a stuttering line of cars being served bottles and bags around the curved driveway of Buddha Hat’s building, and Rocco felt like an Indian in a western, pausing on a butte above a small wagon train before swooping in—except that there were only two cars here and a whole nation of enemies down below.