“No, I don’t understand.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Of what?”
“I imagine once you go flat you can’t turn back.”
“Hehehe. Not funny. And why would I want to turn back?”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re always saying the wrong thing, dickhead.”
“Hey, I’m trying to understand.”
“You’re a moron. You’ll never understand. It’s a shame you’re so fucking cute, though. That’s the only reason I talk to you, you know that. I have some information on that girl you’re looking for.”
“J’Noel Bitelow?”
“I have an associate who did some business with her departed boyfriend. He knows the girl and her mother, who lives on Foster. Seven forty-nine. The Belvedere. Apartment Nine E. You might find her there.”
“Man or woman, you’re still the best, Toni.”
“Just make sure you come see me.”
“Will I recognize you?”
He laughed. “Man or woman, I’ll still be bigger than you.”
“And badder, I’m sure. Even without balls.”
“Hey Blades?”
“Yeah?”
“Malcolm used to roll with a character named Big-Six. He’s nasty. Real heavy hitter. Would fuck his mother with a baseball bat. Watch out for him. Word is he was creeping on Malcolm’s girl.”
“Thanks, babe.”
“Did you just call me ‘babe’?”
“Don’t start, Toni.”
“You can’t call me ‘babe,’ Blades. You can call your friends that but not me. Because I’ll start thinking all kinds of shit.”
“Good-bye, Toni.”
After I hung up I tried to imagine the agony of Toni’s life as a man all these years. I realized it was impossible for me to understand what that feeling was like. But I did know something about trying to live outside your skin. Trying to maintain the presence of blackness under your light complexion without offending your white mother or your white siblings at a time when the easiest thing in the world to do would be to feign neutrality based on the otherness of being mixed-race. But just as Toni couldn’t run from his belief that he was a woman, I couldn’t run from the fact that I’d always felt more comfortable in blackness. Whether or not it was society’s fault for making me feel so ostracized from that other part of me, blackness remained my blanket of comfort. But contemplating Toni’s plight also made me think of my father, and the one question I’d never been able to ask him: Did he ever feel guilty about abandoning his family?
THE DOOR TO St. Paul’s Academy opened and children poured out. I got out of the car and crossed the street. A flat-faced dog at the school gate nipped its tail in its mouth. The owner, doing nothing to dispel the myth that dog owners grow to look like their dogs, smoked a long cigarette not far off.
Chesney came bounding down the steps of the redbrick school. She slowed down to a casual stroll to cross the yard, but on seeing me she broke into a canter, waving her arms in the air.
Outside the gate she tumbled into my arms.
“Sweetness.” I hugged her.
“I thought Mom was coming to pick me up.”
“Well, I know how much you like surprises so I thought I’d surprise you.”
She giggled. “What’s the surprise?”
“Me,” I said. “Am I not a good enough surprise?”
“Yes, but what else?” she insisted.
“This is it. Me. I’m the big surprise.”
“You can’t trick me, Daddy.”
“Okay, Einstein junior. You’re too smart for me. Guess what—we’re going to Disneyland.”
She held my hand as we crossed the street to the car. “Really? Let me see the tickets.”
“Well, I don’t have the tickets yet. They’re being sent to me.”
“When’re we going?”
“When you get out of school in two weeks.”
We got into the car and I started the engine. The Volvo hummed like a well-tuned violin. I adjusted Chesney’s seat belt before hooking myself up, then eased the Volvo into traffic on Court Street.
THIRTY-THREE
t he red-faced Belvedere on Foster was sandwiched between a funeral home and a church almost completely bearded with green ivy. As I parked opposite the building across from a bus stop two flirtatious young women sashayed toward me. The one in red skintight hip-hugging leather pants, slender and flat as a cactus, baited an older man who dared not get out of his truck. The other girl, her earlobes tangled with every variation of gold rings you could imagine, her thin coat unbuttoned in the front to reveal a pink shirt overlaid on breasts standing so straight out they looked as if they’d been hooked on a line, teased a half-peeled banana in and out of her mouth, her face crooked with giggles at the bantering between her friend and the man in the truck.
They crossed the street as if to enter the Belvedere and I got quickly out of the car and followed. The slender girl grilled me with deep wintry eyes as I stood waiting for her to open the door.
“Going to see a friend,” I said.
She stuffed the rest of the banana into her mouth. “Who?”
“Do you know everyone in this building?”
She swallowed, ignoring my confrontational tone. “Yes I do.”
I softened my voice. “She just moved in.”
She held the key in the lock, not twisting. “What apartment?”
“Nine E.”
“Nobody ain’t moved in there. That woman been there since I been here.” Then she paused. “Oh, her daughter just moved back. She’s a little young for you, eh? Her mother’s more your age, I believe. Or are you tapping both them asses?”
The two of them broke into laughter.
The slender one spoke again, as if speaking for both of them. It was the first time I detected a Trinidadian accent. “You look like a man with money. I bet you’d have much more fun with us,” she said.
I felt as if someone had just stuffed a plum into my mouth. “I bet I would.”
She twisted the key; the heavy door opened with a dirty groan. I followed the girls into a high-ceilinged foyer with puke-colored walls and peeling paint that looked like scales on the back of an alligator.
The tiny elevator was straight ahead and the three of us got in. The girl in red leather pressed 10; I pressed 9. The door clanged shut and the elevator whined like an animal about to collapse.
It smelled of musk inside the cramped space; I realized it was the girl in red leather; she was wearing some kind of men’s cologne. From somewhere under her coat she produced a bag of plantain chips and broke it open with a loud pop. Exposing bright silver braces on her teeth she smiled at me with big sad bloodhound eyes and made a grunting sound.
The elevator rumbled to a stop on the ninth floor and the door croaked open.
“Apartment Ten-F. You know what the F stands for. Anything you want,” the slender girl sang out as I got off, her voice trebled with wicked laughter. It was only then I realized her friend had not spoken one word.
AS I STOOD outside apartment 9E I wondered if I shouldn’t have brought flowers considering the way my last meeting with J’Noel went. But it was too late for symbols right now. And I was no longer in the mood for trifling bullshit.
I pressed the brass bell on the right side of the door. The syncopated brush of slippers sliding over linoleum started and reached a pitch close to the door. Someone rattled the cover on the peephole. Then after a minute of silence the bolt of the lock clacked and the door opened the width of the safety chain. J’Noel’s still-swollen face shaded through the opening. Pine scent wafted through the slit.
Her eyes slashed at me. “What do you want?”
“Last time I saw you I left feeling there was something you didn’t tell me.”
“How’d you find me?”
“It’s a long story. Let me in.”
“Go away or I’ll call the cops.”
“Go right ahead
. I’m sure they have some questions for you about your dead boyfriend. I’m not leaving until I talk to you.”
Her face grew grim and her eyes wandered to the floor, as if she was trying to read something on my shoes. She closed the door. The door opened again seconds later, this time all the way. She was swallowed up in a baggy crimson Rocawear sweatsuit; the slippers on her feet were a size large.
The door closed behind me and she locked it. Staggering as if she’d just woken up, she lead me around a tight corner through a dark kitchen into a living room cluttered with boxes, too many chairs, and a glass cabinet full of china that looked like it’d never been touched. The bald green linoleum had been recycled a few times too often. She toppled onto a square couch with a quiet sigh and spread her arms wide across its back like a diva in her dressing room. Behind her was a long mirror with metal pegs in its gilded frame, from which hung several women’s hats.
The rest of the furniture was that nondescript neutral variety you find in many Caribbean immigrant homes, bought from Italian furniture stores like Roma: beige and lilac chairs with pastel flowers covered with clear plastic. I sank into a beige love seat that was much too soft, leaning forward to escape the loose wire in the upholstery that was stabbing me in the back.
She stared at me as if she was looking down a drainpipe. There was a flash of loneliness in her eyes. “Do you get pleasure from bothering people?”
“This isn’t fun for me.”
“I feel sorry for you.”
“How’s your son?”
“You ain’t interested in Malcolm’s health so step back with that shit.”
“I got a little girl, you know. She’s eight.”
“That’s nice, but we won’t be swapping any photos. I don’t like you. People like you don’t care who you have to hurt to get your own way.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“I know your type. Black daddy. White mama. Probably Jewish. ’Cause if your Daddy was white and your mama was black you’d never been a cop. No black woman with a son like you woulda let him become a cop. You probably grow up trying to be just like any other nigger, but in your heart you think you better. I see the way you look around this room. You saying to yourself: I’m glad I don’t live like this.”
“I don’t know what your problem is, J’Noel, but you don’t know me. My mother isn’t Jewish. And even if she was what’s that got to do with the price of beer?”
Her eyes darted angrily at my face. “It’s all the same shit.”
“The police think Malcolm killed the politician.”
“Then why you here bothering me?”
“You and I know that ain’t true. We both know Malcolm was somewhere bleeding to death from your carnivorous attack. So how did that gun get into his apartment?”
“I’m gonna start screaming if you don’t leave.”
“Go ahead. Practice the scales while you’re at it. Then you can sing to the police when they get here. You weren’t as careful as you think, babe.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The call you made to police.”
“What call?”
“The one telling them about the gun.”
“You’re talking shit.”
“Really. It’s all on tape. I listened to it. It’s your voice. Easy enough to prove. The police can do a voice match in half an hour.”
I was bluffing but the look on her face told me I’d caught her.
“You’re a piece of shit.” She stood up and walked to the window.
I breathed deeply; the air tasted of garlic. I looked at her reflection in the mirror. It was not a majestic image, but there was dignity, rough-hewn though it was with an air of sublime indifference to whatever ailed the rest of the world. Here she was living in the incestuous lap of church and funeral home, in a city swarming with charlatans, grim with the presence of cheaters and crooked freaks, a city at once baffling and absurd, for amid all of the life and art there was pain and senseless killings, and all she had to cling to was her anonymity, the passport of self-preservation in this city. It was this jungle instinct fueling her determination not to open up to me, not to get caught up in the history or drama that came with passing information because she knew that once she talked she could no longer hide.
“Did you plant the gun?”
She turned and looked at me as if weighing something heavy on her mind. “I just made the call.”
“Who planted the gun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who told you to make the call?”
Her mouth opened and I got the impression she was about to speak but it seemed she couldn’t get her tongue off the roof of her mouth. “Malcolm has a friend,” she said, her voice strained.
“Big-Six?”
“He said if I didn’t make the call he’d hurt Malcolm Jr.”
“You’re lying again.”
“Fuck off.”
“Biting off your boyfriend’s dick is one thing, being an accomplice to murder is something else altogether.”
Her face turned dark and she looked at me as if she wanted to scratch out my eyes. “I wasn’t even there.”
“You made that call to the police.”
“I told you he forced me.”
“He was your lover. The police will never buy that. Big-Six killed the politician, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s your only way out, J’Noel. You give me Big-Six for the politician’s murder and you may stay out of jail.”
“You’re trying to scare me, but it won’t work.”
“Tell that to Malcolm Jr. when the cops fit you with steel bracelets.”
“I had nothing to do with that politician’s death.”
“You made the call. You’ve got shit all over your shoes.”
“He and Big-Six were planning to do the politician.”
“Who? Malcolm?”
“Yeah.”
“Who hired them?”
“I don’t know that.”
I stared at her, prying deep into her eyes.
“Really. I don’t know. I heard them talking about it,” she confessed.
“When?”
“That same night Malcolm tried to rape me.”
“The night before Ronan was killed?”
“They came to the house that night. Both of them idiots was jacked on some shit. All excited and looking crazed. I heard them talking in the bedroom. Big-Six was saying he wasn’t parking no politician for less than fifty loot.”
“Fifty thousand?”
“Yeah.”
“What did Malcolm say?”
“I didn’t hear.”
“Did they mention Ronan by name?”
“No.”
“So how’d you know it was Ronan?”
“I’m guessing. After I saw the news.”
“Did Malcolm call anybody? Did you hear him talking on the phone after?”
“I don’t remember. Big-Six left shortly after. That’s when Malcolm attacked me.”
“He has a cell phone, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“What’s the number?”
She hesitated, then spoke the numbers slowly. “Nine-one-seven. Eight-three-five. Five-three-eight-eight.”
I took my organizer from my inside breast pocket and jotted the number down. “Where can I find Big-Six? Where does he live?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were fucking the dude.”
“So what? It was nothing to me. I was just using him to get Malcolm off my case. I didn’t want Big-Six. I wanted Malcolm out of my life.”
“Why not just leave the guy?”
“Don’t you think I tried?”
“What’s this Big-Six look like?”
She gave a pithy laugh. “Big dude. Light complexion. Albino-looking with freckles. You couldn’t miss him if you were blind. Always wearing a black Kangol.”
“Are you hiding from Big-Six?”
I got up and said thank you. She ignored my offered handshake and maneuvered past me through the clutter. I followed her. She had the door already open when I reached her. I stepped out into the hallway and heard the door slam behind me. It wasn’t that cold in the hallway but I felt a quiet chill, like a shroud overpowering my spirit. One of those feelings of guilt that was difficult to shake off. I had lied to her but it’d been necessary. I walked toward the elevator thinking I should’ve listened to my mother when she told me I had the brains to be a doctor.
I CALLED Semin Gupta and asked her to find out if Malcolm Nails-Diggs had ever been on lockdown at Rikers and, if so, was he ever one of Dr. Heat’s patients while incarcerated. It was a long shot but I still wasn’t ready to give up on Dr. Heat as a suspect. I got word to Toni that I was looking for this character Big-Six. Toni maintained his accustomed distance, saying he would get back to me.
It didn’t take long. The next morning I had a road map to Big-Six’s life of crime.
HE EARNED the name on the streets of Baltimore, where he ran with a raw crowd of gangbangers who hustled cocaine along the corridor between Philadelphia and Virginia. Urban myth had it that Big-Six took out six roughnecks from an opposing gang with an automatic on a street in Baltimore. After the Feds took down the heads of the crew through an elaborate sting leaving a leadership void, a turf war flared up pitting Big-Six, whose real name was Tracy DeRoguet, against a crew from the East Side. The east-siders won the war and Big-Six fled to New York. It wasn’t easy for an albino to hide in a place like Baltimore.
In New York he packed heat for Terrence Backhouse’s crew in Freeport before slicing meat for a Jamaican gang out of the Red Houses. He was linked by police to the killing of two witnesses in the Red Houses, but all the authorities could make stick was a gun charge for which he served one year. Toni’s informant put Big-Six in a house on East 103rd Street in Flatlands, a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of Brooklyn.
It was a quiet-looking neighborhood, as quiet as you could find in any working-class section of Brooklyn. Once these brooding frame and stucco houses were home to many Italians and Jews; this area, like much of Brooklyn, had been invaded by the Third World and boasted a mixture of immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Love and Death in Brooklyn Page 23