Too Beautiful to Die

by Glenville Lovell

  To avoid looking at her when we stopped for the light at Grand Army Plaza, I focused my gaze out the window at the gray edifice of the Brooklyn Public Library. She spoke for the first time, words ushered out in the quietest of breaths.

  “You have to help me find it.”

  I glanced at her sitting tightly drawn in the seat, staring straight ahead.

  The lights changed, and I pumped gas to the powerful engine, circling the roundabout before veering right and shooting up Union Street.

  “You can have the fifty thousand dollars.” The remote calmness in her voice sent a chill through me.

  “Save your money,” I said, trying to match her self-control.

  “One hundred thousand.”

  I exploded. “Listen, I don’t care how much goddamn money you have, I want nothing more to do with this shit.”

  We didn’t speak again until we reached Carroll Gardens where I said good-bye outside the Yemeni-owned newsstand at President and Smith. I watched her drive off before I went inside to get a pack of cigarettes. I hadn’t had a cigarette in five months and cursed Precious and Jimmy for throwing me back onto a path from which I thought I’d escaped.

  When I came out, Salvatore Carmine, the short white-headed Italian owner of Bagel on the Green, walked by with a few of his pals. Always with a smile on his face, Sal was one of the few people in the neighborhood who knew I’d been a cop before my shooting became the buzz of New York. His brother owned the building I lived in.

  “How’s it going, Blades?”

  “You tell me, Sal. All I can see is smoke.”

  He winked. “Don’t let the smoke get in your eyes.”

  Set in the middle of President Street, between Smith and Hoyt, the prewar brownstone I lived in was one of many landmark buildings in this old Italian neighborhood of South Brooklyn, now being forced to accommodate the influx of young professionals, students and artists fleeing Manhattan’s exorbitant rents but still wanting to live close enough to the Village to take a cab home after midnight when the subways were deemed too dangerous for white people.

  ICHECKED MY machine first thing. Anais still hadn’t called. I called her but she wasn’t in. I left a message for her to call me as soon as she got home. After a shower I heated some leftover chicken and Chinese cabbage. I tried to eat, but I couldn’t find my appetite. I went to lie down. The obnoxious DJ on BLS seemed to be getting his freak on playing Third World’s 96 Degrees in the Shade over and over again.

  “What fucking shade?” I screamed at the radio.

  Air churning from the fan at the foot of my bed felt as if it were coming from an eighteen-wheeler’s exhaust. I kicked the fan in disgust. It toppled to the floor with a heavy clank and droned to a stop.

  I sat up. Fat beads of sweat wobbled down my naked chest. Righting the fan, I tried to start it again. It gurgled like a clogged sewer and died. I knew it was a piece of crap, but did it have to die in the middle of a goddamn heat wave? My air conditioner had croaked earlier, and now this. Inside my one-bedroom apartment, you could’ve sizzled a steak on my body. And I’m talking well-done.

  The DJ laughed insidiously and decided to play 96 Degrees in the Shade one more time. Not funny, brother. Not funny. I got up and switched the dial to WGBO, a jazz station.

  The only cool place in my apartment was the fridge, and that’s where I headed as sweat flowed down my armpits. Standing with the fridge door open, I welcomed the cold blast, hoping the capsules of water would permanently crystallize on my body.

  I grabbed a jug of water and drank half with controlled carelessness, letting most of it escape the corners of my mouth to waterfall down my neck and chest before closing the fridge door reluctantly. My head pulsed from a tension-induced headache. Jug in hand, I treaded wearily across the blotchy wood floor to the bathroom. I took a leak, shook my Johnson, and waddled back to the bedroom, my Johnson swinging outside my shorts.

  As I was about to lie down again the telephone rang. I snatched up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “There must be something I can do to change your mind.” It was Precious.

  “I really can’t help you,” I said.

  “You could’ve helped me search that apartment.”

  “Looked like somebody already did that.”

  “I don’t often beg, Mr. Overstreet.”

  “This guy could’ve been selling you bubble gum.”

  “What would it take for you to find that out?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I’m sorry I troubled you,” she said, and hung up.

  I lit a cigarette and decided to try the old air conditioner again. Incredibly, I was greeted by the familiar hum of the engine. It hummed melodiously like an opera singer tuning her voice. Then cool air began to sift the heat. I sat back on the bed and smiled. If only Anais would call.

  4

  FOR AGES NEW YORK has been a Mecca for immigrants. The boom in Caribbean immigration to New York began in the late 1950s, but long before that tide, Caribbean people had been flowing through this city in a steady stream since the early twentieth century. Many of these early immigrants settled in Harlem. Some, like Claude McKay, gained fame for their artistic talents in the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance. Other sages like Marcus Garvey propelled the Black Nationalist movement. My grandmother was among those early immigrants. Arriving from Panama, she lived first on Madison Avenue in Harlem, before buying her only other home, in Brooklyn.

  For some Manhattanites, Brooklyn Heights was the only part of Brooklyn worth visiting, and then only under the duress of calling on a sick friend. It was their only point of reference when talking about the borough. Others might venture as far as Park Slope to attend a controversial exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum—which is technically in Crown Heights, but don’t tell them that. To them, the areas east or south of Brooklyn Heights were vast expanses of empty spaces, where the flotsam of Third World ineptness came to hide from despots, lurching about dark streets with angry scowls and barking guns, a hysteria constantly fueled by the media. Those of us who’ve entered this ugly gray matter beyond Brooklyn Heights have discovered real people, attempting to live the American Dream in places like Crown Heights.

  With its nineteenth-century mansions in the northern section, limestone row houses and apartment buildings in the southern section, Crown Heights—which serves as the backdrop for the annual West Indian Carnival Day Parade—remains the neighborhood of choice for most Caribbean immigrants who still flock to New York, but East Flatbush and Canarsie have gained in popularity over the years as whites continue their flight to the suburbs. Many of these immigrants now own businesses along Brooklyn’s main thoroughfares.

  Leroy James came to New York from Trinidad in 1968. Under the name of Mello-Creme he sang calypso in Trinidad, but his meager recordings reaped little success. In America, with a new alias, Milo-Tea, he suffered the indignity of being banned from performing on the Parkway one Labor Day for offensive lyrics. He retired from calypso after that.

  When I joined the NYPD in 1988 he was a caretaker at the academy. I told him how much I loved calypso music since my grandmother played nothing but Roaring Lion and Mighty Sparrow in her house. He began feeding me tapes of himself, Sparrow, Lord Kitchener, Blakey and others.

  Out of this camaraderie grew a business idea. Five years later, while I was still an undercover cop, we opened Caribbean Music City on Nostrand Avenue across from the St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church. The next year I was off the force.

  We lost money the first year and almost closed. The next few years we broke even thanks to Milo’s charm, especially with women. Sometimes I’d come into the store to find him singing a cappella to customers. Our roles became clearly defined. In the business of selling, seduction was Milo’s game. I took care of the books.

  I got to the record store around ten the next day. My usual parking spot in front of the store was taken, so I circled the block twice before parking on Midwood, two blocks away
.

  I locked the car and walked north. It was another humid day in New York; by the time I reached Allan’s Bakery, one block away, my blue polo shirt had stuck to my back. On a day like today, standing in Allan’s Bakery would’ve been unbearable. The place had no air-conditioning, and with its standing in the community as one of the most popular bakeries, the line sometimes linked twenty people or more; luckily, there was no line today. I ordered codfish and spinach patties for breakfast and a few currant rolls for my partner and lit out of there in two minutes with my self-respect still intact having sweated no more than normal.

  As I paused for the light opposite the opulent summer gardens of St. Francis of Assisi, I realized I was still suffering from last night’s events. I hadn’t slept well. There was a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach and my head throbbed.

  Milo was alone in the store. He was a small man, thin as a guitar string but as dependable as a priest. Generally a sharp dresser, he wore jeans and a blue cotton tee this morning. Recently he’d begun dyeing his hair. He didn’t need to. His unmarked face and clear eyes would never betray his true age—sixty—even if he allowed his gray to show.

  “What’s the matter, Milo, your woman burned your good threads?”

  “Hey Blades, I thought you weren’t coming in today.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said so yesterday. That you was picking up Anais at the airport today.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s taking a late flight,” I lied. “Kinda quiet today, huh?” I said to change the subject. I was very annoyed that Anais hadn’t called.

  “It’s early, man. You know how it is. This ain’t Manhattan. Poor folks gotta work. They don’t shop till evening.”

  “Well, these poor folks better start spending some money in here soon or we gonna have to stand on the corner with a tin cup,” I joked.

  “Aw, c’mon. Things smooth.”

  I gave him the bag with the currant rolls. “You might be smooth, Milo, but not things. I do the books, remember.”

  Knowing its contents he placed the bag on the shelf beneath the register; he’d open it when he got hungry. “We need to do some more advertising.”

  “Milo, we have more traffic in here than a crack house. The problem is that most of the people who clog up the store are your friends and they don’t buy shit. They just come to hear you talk, and to brag about how many women they boned. If I could get a dollar for every lie you guys tell on your dicks, I could retire.”

  He laughed cheerfully. “I tell you, Blades, you can’t blame we, man. Trini woman sweet, but like money. Hard to get. Harder to keep. American woman now: easy as picking mangoes. So the fellas having a good time. If I was younger—”

  “If you were younger you’d be dead. These young girls would drink your skinny Milo ass in one slurp.”

  He sucked his teeth and laughed out loud. “American girls might be easy, but if you think them can take more dick than Trini gal, man, is joke you making. When I was back in Port of Spain, I lived with this woman. Boy, she wanting the thing the minute I wake up and the minute I get home. I get to find out me next-door neighbor was coming by to work the ground when I was at work. Boy, I was never so happy to take a horn. But you know, I couldn’t leave she out. She was just too sweet.”

  I laughed and went through the door behind the register into the office.

  On the office walls, freshly painted a glossy white, were two life-size posters: a bright color print of Bob Marley smoking a spliff, a wave of thick blue smoke curling into the air; and one of Pam Grier in a low-cut red dress smiling seductively at me. Bob was my favorite musician. Pam had been the source of many wet dreams when I was growing up, ever since I saw Foxy Brown.

  The phone rang before I could sit down. I let it ring, knowing that Milo would pick up outside. A few seconds later I heard his voice: “It’s the preacher.”

  I’d hired three high-profile lawyers to handle my case against the City, which had been dragging its feet over a settlement. My case was too strong for the City to risk a trial, my lawyers kept telling me, but I was yet to smell a dime. One of my lawyers, Franklyn Rose, a black Harvard-educated Gucci-dressing Wall Street huckster, was on the line. Milo called him the preacher.

  “What’s up, Frankie?”

  “Good morning, Blades.” His voice boomed with the melodic riff of a preacher in mid sermon. “I think they’re ready to talk some numbers.”

  “I’ve heard that before, Frankie. I ain’t smiling.”

  “I got a call from their lead attorney. They want to talk. Over lunch.”

  “I don’t trust them, Frankie. The Mayor will do anything to make me sweat.”

  “Jesus, you’re kind of raw today, my brother.”

  “Just get it settled, Frankie. I’m tired of being dicked around.”

  I hung up the phone. Seconds later it rang again. This time I picked up. Anais’ voice, like a smoky Cassandra Wilson solo, expanded in my ear.

  “Blades, I’m sorry, but I won’t be coming tonight after all.”

  “I guessed that. Why? What’s the matter?” I tried not to sound annoyed.

  “My agent has set up another screen test. Are you upset?”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “When’re you coming?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you.”

  “I was really looking forward to seeing you, Anais.”

  “You’re upset, aren’t you?”

  “You could’ve called last night. Why didn’t you call? I called you twice.”

  “Look, Blades, we’ve been apart over a year now. Don’t let what happened last month go to your head, okay? It was nothing.”

  “What do you mean it was nothing?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe it.”

  “It meant nothing to you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Look, Blades, I gotta go.”

  “We gotta talk this through, Anais.”

  “I need more than talk, Blades.”

  “What the fuck do you want me to do, Anais? I’m trying. But you’re not working with me.”

  Her voice perked up. “You’re trying? You never take my concerns seriously, Blades.”

  “You really think I would hurt you, Anais?”

  “I don’t know, Blades. And I need to be sure.”

  “Didn’t I seem calmer in L.A.?”

  Pause. I listened to her heavy breathing. I imagined she was next to me and I could smell her perfume.

  “Well, answer me. You said so yourself. I’m over it, Anais. The NYPD is out of my system. I’m ready to move on. But I can’t do that without you. What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”

  “I gotta go, Blades. I’ll call you later.”

  “No, Anais! Tell me what’s going on out there!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’re seeing somebody, tell me. Tell me the truth.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything, Blades. Because I got weak and gave you some when you were out here don’t mean I’m ready to come back to you. I didn’t promise you anything. Don’t act like you own me because I gave you a sniff.”

  “A sniff? Did you say a sniff?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “I can’t believe you said that. A sniff?”

  Her voice grew thin, defensive. “Okay, Blades, don’t get into one of your passions. Let it go.”

  “Why’d you say that?”

  “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. It slipped out.”

  “Jesus, Anais. I came to California because I loved you. Not to get a sniff.”

  “Okay now, you’re trying to browbeat me, and I’m not having it. Good-bye.”

  “You’re seeing somebody, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Then why can’t you
come?”

  “I just told you. I’ve got to work.”

  “So, when’re you coming?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll keep you informed.”

  “Sure,” I replied. “Keep me informed.”

  I slammed the phone down and sat as the chinging reverberation burned through my skin.

  5

  NEW YORK IS one of those cities that can turn a gloomy day grand by force of its energy. And vice versa. It is a city open for anything, including spirituality. I’d been up all night, naked, listening to Mingus. I like listening to Mingus when I’m troubled. And troubled I was. Not only by Anais’ decision not to return to New York, but by the consequences should the police find out about my presence in that apartment where a murder had taken place. Mingus’ music unfolds in a kaleidoscope of sounds and ideas, which lifts me out of my head and gets me pondering things beyond my trifling worries. At dawn a sunny spirit surged through me. Many people would call me a skeptic, but I have my moments.

  As the morning sun fattened I sipped coffee at the kitchen table with Mingus’ Haitian Fight Song playing in the background. After my second cup, taken with a smidgen of cream, I got up to get dressed.

  A breeze drifted in through the bedroom window. The white gauzy curtains peeled back like moth’s wings opening. Across the street the leaves of the pine trees danced with a vitality I hadn’t seen in days. It was a welcome sight after the flat heat of the past few days. The smell of spilled oil wafted in to remind me that dreams of tropical beaches and coconut trees were still premature.

  THE MINUTE I saw them I knew the two men hovering around my car were Feds. It was the way they seemed to appropriate everything around them. The space. The air. The trees. The way they smirked as I approached. The way they balanced space between them, like Judge and Jury.

  They were both big men. The sweaty one leaning on the trunk of my Volvo wore a tan suit, his stomach protruding over the pants. With a round marshmallow face, gray stubble and a thick bristly mustache, he looked like someone who’d woken up, discovered that razors had been banned and said hallelujah. The other, in a dark gray suit, stood erect near the passenger door cleaning his teeth with a plastic toothpick. His receding wispy hair pulled back behind large fluffy ears, bulbous nose and silver-dollar eyes presented an image of a cast-off villain from a Batman cartoon.