Clockers (87 page)

“I tried to call in on the Hat anonymous,” Strike said halfheartedly. But then Rodney came back into his mind and Strike put a stop to his own ramblings. “Look, all I can tell you for real is what I’m saying now. And you
know
the man on top is ruh-right outside that door just like—”

The Homicide cut him off. “‘Yeah, I hear he’s a dope dealer too,’” he said, quoting Victor in a raw voice.

Strike said nothing.

“When your brother said that to you about Darryl, how’d he say it?” The Homicide regarded him through narrowed eyes, dragging him back to Rudy’s, to Victor.

“I don’t know.” Strike heard the whine in his own voice.“He gave me this funny look.”

“What do you mean funny?”

Strike shrugged.

“You mean like, he crossed his eyes and stuck his thumbs in his ears?”

Strike looked away.

“Funny like how?”

“Like he knows something.”

“Like he sees through you?”

“I don’t know.” Strike hesitated, recalling Victor’s secret smile, his liquor-dimmed eyes. “Yeah OK, that.”

“Don’t
agree
with me.”

“Like he knows I’m bullshitting him on the girl thing.”

“And ‘got to be got.’”

“What?”

“Then he said…”

“Naw,
I
said that.”

“But you said
he
said it.”

“Yeah, but like after me.”

“How’d he say it?”

“‘Got to be got.’” Strike shrugged.

The Homicide glared at him.

“He was goofin’ on me. He was fucked up.”

“How?”

“Like high.”

“High. Roaring drunk? Semiconscious?”

“No, like…”

“Like what?”

”
Hunchy.
“ Strike winced, unthinkingly imitating Victor by sinking his head between his shoulders, remembering the bloom of orange uniform peeking out under the footrail, the heavily inked cocktail napkins.

As if reading his mind, the cop said, “Was he doodling?”

“I don’t know.” Strike rubbed his mouth, not wanting this cop or anybody else to know about Aroundball. “I was nervous. I wasn’t, you know…”

“Was he angry when he said it?”

“Maybe, you know like,
under
things.”

“Under things?”

“On the inside.” Strike momentarily rested his forehead on the table, then lifted it up.

“I know somebody’d do it, too,’” the Homicide quoted again. “What did he look like when he said that?”

“He didn’t look like nothin’. He was just writin’ on that napkin, you—” Strike froze, having just given his brother’s doodling away, the Homicide catching it but looking as if it was no big deal, as if he knew it anyway.

“‘My Man, he’d do it for nothing. He’d do it for me.’” The Homicide squinted, cocked his head. “For
you?
”

“No, for Victor. You know, like they were tight.”

“Tight,” the Homicide muttered, and then he was silent.

Strike stared at the calendar over the cop’s head, the march of days, the long-gone month. He thought of Victor in jail.

“My Man,” the cop announced lightly, no question in his tone, no challenge at all.

Hating this, Strike spoke again. “Yeah, I dint want to ask him like a name, so…”

“No, huh?” The cop sounded almost amused.

“Yeah. I mean, I said, ‘Do I know this guy?’”

“Yeah, and?”

Strike paused. “He says, ‘I don’t know
who
you know anymore. But you might, yeah, you might.’”

“‘You might…’” The cop aped him in a faint high voice.

Strike stared at the calendar again. The air felt heavy and muffled, as if this was a chamber at the bottom of the ocean.

“You gonna arrest Rodney now?”

The cop didn’t answer.

“You gonna arrest me?”

Still no answer.

Strike greeted this possible good news with a wary nod. And then it just came out of him: “You gonna arrest Victor?”

Rocco sat slumped in his chair, ignoring Strike’s question, hearing himself pitching his case to Jimmy Newton in the restaurant: “When do I ever encounter a truly innocent man?” Or better still, a few days later: “This kid is as pure as the driven snow.”

It all seemed so obvious now. The only mystery was how he could have been so blind for so long.

Rocco heard the chorus of voices blaring in his head, the life-witnesses who had been hand feeding him the truth for the better part of a week. He imagined the day that had ended with Victor Dunham shooting Darryl Adams: the kid standing rigid and self-conscious for hours in a boutique on Columbus Avenue, then fending off a bunch of young clockers at Hambone’s, then heading early to Rudy’s, throwing back a few too many, listening to Strike’s pernicious rantings, brooding about his day, his life, thinking about that dope dealer across the street, the gun in the gym bag at his feet…

There was no reason to doubt that Victor had found the 9 mm and had been walking around with it for weeks, like a stick of dynamite carrying its own detonator. Mazilli had just about had it right: the shooting was just the capper on a bad day.

Finally, after twenty years, a Mission.

Now
there’s
an innocent man.

I know guilty and I know innocent.

Strike coughed nervously, nudging Rocco out of his sullen constructions. Rocco looked into the kid’s anxious face, wondering what he could be thinking, him and his My Man theory, his Buddha Hat nonsense. The kid had been just as blind, both of them deluded by their own jaded innocence.

“It was Victor shot Darryl, right?” Strike said heavily, looking at Rocco open-mouthed, waiting for an explanation.

Rocco was surprised to discover that he couldn’t meet the kid’s eyes. Gazing off, he heard the mother’s words coming back at him: “If he said he did it, then he did it. Why don’t you believe him?” Because, Rocco answered her now, he
needed
the other brother to be the do-er, he needed that fraternal symmetry in order to conjure up the spirit of Mission, in order to anchor himself in his job before he drowned in his own banal terrors. He just didn’t
want
Victor to be dirty on this; it screwed up everything.

“Shit.” Strike whispered, shaking his head.

Still thinking of the mother, Rocco recalled her saying something else: “He told you it was self-defense.” She had insisted on that bald lie; Victor too, coming on to him in the jail with a passionate dishonesty that didn’t jibe with anything else in his character. Maybe it was just the two of them putting their heads together and coming up with a compromise between surrender and facing that mandatory thirty in, but…

“Woo-woo,” Strike stuttered softly, sounding like a mournful wind. “Woo-what … Can I do something for him?”

Rocco watched the kid palm his gut, then looked him full in the face. It was amazing how much the two brothers resembled each other at certain moments.

“Nothing?” the kid asked dejectedly.

Rocco rose to his feet and extended a hand. “You want to do something?”

Strike leaned back, looking both alarmed and hopeful.

Rocco escorted him out of the room and down the hall to the Homicide office, steered him to his desk, pulled out his chair and then pressed on Strike’s shoulders until he sank into the seat, the kid’s disoriented motions diminishing him, making him seem like a child.

Rocco sat on the corner of the desk facing Strike. He reached for the phone and placed it directly in front of the kid. Then he opened a drawer between his legs and took out a beat-up tape recorder and a suction-tipped induction wire, plugging one end into the machine and attaching the other end to the spine of the receiver.

“You want to do something? I want you to call your mother.”

The kid sat up in surprise. “Whoa. We-We ain’t talkin’ to each other right now. We’re goin’ through—”

”
I
don’t give a fuck!” Rocco exploded, startling both Strike and himself. “What am I, your fucking social worker?” He took a slow breath and came back down. “I want you to call your mother and I want you to ask her what Victor and her talked about over the phone the night Darryl Adams got shot. Just don’t tell her where you’re calling from. Can you handle that?”

As Strike dialed, the thin white induction wire dangling down his forearm to the desk, Rocco turned on the tape recorder and punched the loudspeaker button on the telephone. The amplified ringing on the other end sounded cheap and hollow.

Strike held the receiver pressed to his ear, his mouth open in a perfect loop of anxiety.

“Who…”

Rocco recognized ShaRon’s voice. He took a position a few feet to the side of the desk, wanting to give the kid the illusion of privacy.

“My mother there?” Strike stared at his voice coming back at him from the speaker slats.

“Who…”

“This Ronald.”

Rocco didn’t hear anyone come on the line, but after a few seconds Strike announced, “Mommy…” His eyes briefly flicked toward Rocco in embarrassment.

“Ronald?”

Cupping the mouthpiece, Strike hunched over. “Mommy.”

“Are you hurt?” she said.

“Unh-uh. Why?” He touched his nose.

“What Andre did…”

Strike’s face briefly buckled as he rubbed a bony finger along his brow.

“Mommy…”

Rocco heard the woman breathing, waiting.

“I ain’t clockin’ no more.” The woman still waited.

“I know…” Strike sighed, as if not wanting to hear his own declarations, his eyes darting from the desk blotter to Rocco and back. “I know you don’t…”

Strike stopped again, and Rocco resisted making a speed-it-up gesture. The kid would have to get there his own way.

“Mommy…” A blind pause, and then he said it: “Victor.”

A choked whooping sound rose up from the speaker, more pain in that one noise than anything Rocco had heard or seen in two interviews.

Strike glared at Rocco and put a splayed palm over the speaker slats as if blocking the lens of a camera.

“Oh Ronald,” she said, her voice cracking.

“I dint tell him to do that. I don’t know what happened. Did he tell you I told him to do that?”

“Ronald…”

The kid punched his own forehead. “I dint … I’m gonna
help
him. I’m gonna
help
him.” He wiped a crescent of sweat from under one eye.

Rocco could hear the voices of small children somewhere in the speaker, fragmented and far away—voices heard while dozing at a beach.

Strike took a ragged breath. “Mommy, what did he say to you on the phone that night?”

“He didn’t talk to me.” Her voice was suddenly sober and alert.

Confused, Strike looked to Rocco, who nodded, egging the kid on to break down her lie.

“He said he called you.”

“He didn’t call me.”

“Mommy, what did he say to you?”

More silence. Rocco slipped his hands in his pockets, waiting. “Mommy, I’m gonna help him,” Strike said, looking to Rocco. Rocco nodded reassuringly.

“He said…” Her voice died.

“What?”

“He called me from some bar, said to me, T think I’m gonna do something bad.’ I said to him, ‘What do you
mean,
you’re gonna do something bad?’ He said, T don’t know, I don’t know.’ I said ‘Victor, what happened?’ He said, ‘I’m gonna do something. I
got
to. I can’t take it no more.’ I said, ‘Come home,’ but he just keeps saying, T can’t take it. I can’t take it.’ I say, ‘Where
are
you? I’ll come get you.’ He won’t tell me where he is, he just…” She took a chattery breath and started weeping, her voice climbing to a light croon.

Strike’s knees were bobbing like jackhammers. Embarrassed, Rocco turned away.

“I can’t take it no more,” she said.

“Mommy … I’m gonna
help
him.”

“He…” The woman’s voice caught, pushed out a breath, then let loose. “He comes home like an hour later? He runs in the house, runs right into the bathroom, gets sick for I don’t know
how
long, comes out and crawls into my bed, just like when you were kids. He got a fever, I can see it in his face. I say, ‘What happened, Victor? What did you do?’ He says, T shot somebody.’ He’s so hot, he’s so sick, he says, ‘Mommy, I was gonna lose my mind. I couldn’t take it no more.’ He says, ‘It was me or him, me or him.’ ‘Who’d you shoot? What he do to you?’ He just runs out the room, starts throwing up again, all night he’s throwing up, him with his stomach. I can’t even talk to him, find out what happened. He’s just rolling around the bed, running in and out the bathroom. I don’t know if that other boy is hurt, dead, alive, and come the morning he says he can’t get out of bed, his legs are cramped, he can’t walk. Then he says ‘Mommy it was like a dream. I just saueezed the trigger he went down so
hard.
“ He says, ‘Mommy, tell me what I should do ‘ I say ‘Did you kill him?’ He says, ‘I think so. What should I do?’ Then he tells me to leave him alone for a while, close the door. I go outside to the living room then I’m thinking Wait a minute I run back into the bedroom, Ronald Your brother’s sitting on mv bed with a pun to his chest He asks me again ‘What should I do? And You know what I said? I said ‘You gonna be late for work.’ I didn’t know what else to say Can you imagine that? ‘You gonna be late for work’”

“I’m gonna
help
him,” Strike said, his eyes wild, his cheeks wet.

“Ronald, your brother was sittin’ there with a gun to his chest. If I hadn’t walked right back in…”

Strike turned to Rocco, jerking with surprise, as if he’d forgotten that Rocco was there. A little growl escaped from his throat, and he began punching at the telephone panel until the speaker shut off.

Rocco turned his back on their conversation, then took a walk around the room. He thought of Victor, saw him standing at the conference table in County, saying to him and Jimmy Newton, “It was self-defense. I can live with that.” No wonder the mother had stonewalled him about getting the phone call. She had been afraid to say the wrong thing, knowing she might turn the investigation around and get her son truly and legally sunk. Victor had called her less than an hour before the murder, pretty much told her what he was going to do, then gone out and done it. Purposeful Homicide. Thirty in.