Cela s’est passé, the young man had told me as we watched the men dancing in the L&F twenty-six years ago. That is over.
* * *
Yesterday I was at Waterloo Station in London, hurrying to catch the train to Basingstoke. I walked past the Eurostar terminal, the sleek Paris-bound bullet trains like marine animals waiting to churn their way back through the Chunnel. Curved glass walls separated me from them; armed security patrols and British soldiers strode along the platform, checking passenger IDs and waving people to the trains.
I was just turning toward the old station when I saw them. They were standing in front of a glass wall like an aquarium’s: a middle-aged man in an expensive-looking dark blue overcoat, his black hair still thick though graying at the temples, his hand resting on the shoulder of his companion. A slightly younger man, very thin, his face gaunt and ravaged, burned the color of new brick by the sun, his fair hair gone to gray. He was leaning on a cane; when the older man gestured, he turned and began to walk slowly, painstakingly down the platform. I stopped and watched: I wanted to call out, to see if they would turn and answer, but the blue-washed glass barrier would have muted any sound I made.
I turned, blinking in the light of midday, touched the bandana at my throat and the notebook in my pocket; and hurried on. They would not have seen me anyway. They were already boarding the train. They were on their way to Paris.
CHRISTMAS IN DODGE CITY
BY BENJAMIN M. SCHUTZ
6th & O Streets, N.W.
(Originally published in 2005)
Sharnella Watkins had never walked into a police station in her life. She’d been tossed in delirious or drunk, carried in kicking and screaming, and marched in on a manacled chorus line. But walk in on her own, never. That would have been like sex. Another thing that if it was up to her, she’d never do.
She checked both ways before she crossed the street, searching for witnesses, not traffic, and clattered over on her nosebleed heels.
She knocked on the bulletproof plastic at the information center.
The desk sergeant looked up from his racing form. “Help you, ma’am?”
“I’d like to talk to that detective, the big one. He’s bald and he gots a beard down in front, ah, you know, ah Van Dyke they calls it, oh yeah, he wears glasses, too.”
“That’s detective Bitterman, ma’am, and why would you like to talk to him?”
“It’s personal.”
“Well, he’s working now. Why don’t you come back when his shift ends?”
“When’s that?”
“Six o’clock.”
“I can’t wait that long. Can you give me his phone number? I’ll call him.”
“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t do that. Unless you’re family. You aren’t family, are you?” The desk man sniggered. Big Bad Bitterman and this itty-bitty black junkie whore.
“No, I guess you’re not. Sorry ’bout that.” The desk man looked down, trying to root out a winner in all those optimistic names.
Sharnella knew the truth would be pointless, but along with a nonexistent gag reflex, the other gift that had kept her alive on the streets all these years was the unerring ability to pick the right lie when she had to.
She leaned forward so that her bright red lips were only inches from the divider and sneered. Then, shaking her head, she said, “You think you’re so smart. Well, lets me tell you something. It ain’t me what needs him. He’s been looking for me. He wants to talk to me. And now, I’m telling you both, to go fuck yo’selves. I ain’t coming back, and I ain’t gonna talk to him and …” She got close enough for the desk man to count her missing molars: “I’m gonna tell him it was your sorry bullshit what pissed me off and he should see you ’bout why he can’t solve no cases no more.”
The desk man had been following her little breadcrumbs of innuendo and found himself ending up face to face with Mount Bitterman. The explosion wouldn’t be that bad. Bitterman had made enough enemies that if he declared you one, you’d as likely be toasted as shunned. Bitterman never forgot and never forgave.
The desk man had endured too much inexplicable disappointment and loss to risk an angry Bitterman.
As Sharnella turned to walk away, the desk man said: “Hold your horses, bitch. This is his number at headquarters.” He wouldn’t write it down for her, hoping her memory would fail. She’d be fucked and Bitterman would have no cause. As she backed away, mouthing the numbers to fix them in her disloyal mind, the desk man said, “You know Bitterman only listens to the dead. I hope you find him soon.”
Across town, Detective Avery Bitterman reached down and pulled on his dick. One of the advantages of a closed front desk. He’d notice himself doing this more since his divorce. A dispassionate review told him that it wasn’t for pleasure but rather to reassure himself that he was still all there, a feeling he had less and less often these days.
The receptionist at headquarters told him that he had a call from a Sharnella Watkins and that she said it was an emergency. “Put it through,” he said.
“Is this Detective Bitterman?”
“Yes, it is. How may I help you?”
“You probably don’t remember me, but I remembers you. You arrested my boy Rondell. You was the only one who didn’t beat up on him. You wouldn’t let nobody hurt him.”
Bitterman shook his head, remembering. That’s right, ma’am. I wouldn’t let them lynch him. I thought it would be more fitting if your son got sent to Lorton, where he could meet the two sons of the woman he raped, sodomized, and tortured to death. Those mother’s sons and some friends tied him down, inserted a hedge shears up Rondell’s ass, opened him up and strung his intestines around him like he was a Christmas tree. When, to their delight, this didn’t kill him, they poured gasoline over him like he was a sundae and set him on fire.
“No, I do remember you, Sharmella.”
“SharNella.” She knew she was right to call this man. He remembered her. He would help her.
“It’s my baby, Dantreya. He’s gone, Mr. Bitterman. I know he’s in some kind of trouble …”
What a fuckin’ surprise. “Ma’am, I’m a homicide detective. You want to go to your local district house and file a missing persons report. I can’t help you with this.”
“Please, Mr. Bitterman. They won’t do anything. They’ll just say, ‘That’s what kids do,’ and with me as a mother why not stay out all night. But he’s not like that. He’s different than my others. He’s a good boy. He goes to school. He’s fifteen and he never been in no trouble. Never, not even little things. He likes to draw. He wants to be an artist. You should come and see what he draws. Please, Mr. Bitterman, he’s all I got left. It’s Christmas tomorrow. I just want my baby home.” Wails gave way to staccato sobbing.
Sharnella’s tears annoyed Bitterman. I’m a homicide detective, that’s what I do, he said to no one. I can’t deal with this shit. It ain’t my job. Come back when he’s dead. Then I’ll listen.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I understand how you feel. But the beat cops can keep an eye out for him. You tell them where he’s likely to go. That’s your best bet, not me. I’m sorry. I gotta go now.”
Bitterman hung up over her wailing “No’s.” Where was he going to go? He was head of the cold case squad. These days, everything was a cold case. Arrest and conviction rates were lower for homicide than for jaywalking. The killers were younger, bolder and completely without restraint. The law of the jungle, “an eye for an eye,” would have been a welcome relief. The law of the streets was “an eye for a hangnail.” Everything was a killing offense. Motive was nothing, opportunity and means were ubiquitous. Children packed lunchbox, thermos, and sidearm in their knapsacks for school. The police were the biggest provider of handguns. Three thousand had disappeared from the city’s property rooms to create more dead bodies that the medical examiner’s office couldn’t autopsy, release or bury. That for Bitterman was the guiding symbol of his work these days. Handguns on a conveyor belt back to the streets
, and the frozen dead serving longer and longer sentences in eternity’s drunk tank.
The phone jerked Bitterman back from his reverie.
“Mr. Bitterman, this is Sharnella Watkins. Don’t hang up on me. I can help you. My boy’s gone, ’cause they want to kill him.”
“Who’s they, Sharnella?”
“The 6th and O Crew.”
“Sharnella, you said your son had never been in trouble. The 6th and O Crew is nothing but. Why am I listening to this?”
“He didn’t do nothing. He was coming home from school with a trophy he got at a art show, and Lufer tried to take it from him, but my baby wouldn’t give it to him and when Lufer tried again he hit him with it and knocked him down and my baby ran off. He said Lufer went to get his gun and was yellin’ that he’d kill him for sure. And he would, that boy’s purely mean. He kill you for no reason.”
“Sharnella, this still doesn’t help me. Get to the help-me part or I’m hangin’ up.”
Sharnella had never given a policeman a straight answer in her life. But her baby was in danger. Sharnella never stopped to think why she felt so differently about this child, her fourth, than any of the others, only that she did and that his death, after all the others, would kill her too.
“This boy, Lufer Timmons. He’s killed a bunch of people. That’s what everybody says. Everybody afraid of him. They say he’s the Crew’s main shooter. But he does it when it ain’t business, just ’cause he likes it. And he said he’ll kill my boy. Doesn’t that help you, Mr. Bitterman?”
The Crew favored death as a solution to all its problems. Giving the delivery man a name was a help. “Tell you what, Sharnella. You go over to the station house like I said and give ’em all the information about your son. Bring a picture, a list of all of his friends and where they live, and where he’s been known to hang out. Tell them to fax me a copy of all that. I’ll look into it.”
Her story was probably 90 percent bullshit and 10 percent horseshit for flavor, but Bitterman knew he’d check it out. You turned over every rock and picked up every squiggling thing. That was his motto: No Corner Too Deep, No Corner Too Dark.
Bitterman tried to remember Sharnella from her second son’s trial. She’d started dropping babies at fourteen and was done before twenty. That’d make her around thirty-five now. She looked fifty. Flatbacking and mainlining aged women with interest. Beginning as a second-generation whore, Sharnella’s childhood had been null and void; her prime had passed unnoticed, one sweaty afternoon in a New York Avenue motel.
Bitterman was more aware of time than ever before. He’d lifted and run and dragged his ugly white man’s game to basketball courts all over the city. Elbow and ass, he rebounded with the best even though he couldn’t jump over a dime. No one ever forgot a pick he set or an outlet pass that went end to end, but he remembered not to shoot too often or try to dribble and run at the same time. His twenties and thirties didn’t seem all that different, but now at forty-five he knew he wasn’t the same man. Bald by choice, rather than balding. Thicker but not yet fat, slower both in reflexes and foot speed. Maybe mellowing was nothing more than realizing that he couldn’t tear the doors off the world anymore. The long afternoon of invincibility had passed.
Sharnella’s second son, Jabari, had killed a rival drug dealer in a rip-off attempt that also killed a nursing student driving by. Her only daughter, Female, with a short “a” and a long “e,” so named by the hospital and then taken by Sharnella, who liked the sound of it, had died of an overdose of extremely good cocaine at the age of sixteen. Everything she delivered died or killed someone else.
Bitterman called down to Identification and Records.
“Get me the file on Lufer Timmons. If there’s a picture make a copy for me and send it up with the file. And see if there’s a file on Dantreya Watkins.”
Bitterman sat at his desk awaiting the files, massaging his eyes.
Bitterman had tried to catch a case of racism for years, a really virulent one, but to no avail. He had mumps when he needed anthrax. It would have made his job so much easier. No sadness for the wasted lives, no respect for the courage of the many, no grief for the victims, no compassion for the survivors.
He’d been a homicide cop in a black city for almost his entire adult life. He’d seen every form of violence one person could do to another. He’d seen black women who’d drowned their own babies, and ones who’d ripped their own flesh at the chalk outlines of a fallen son. Men who’d shot and stabbed an entire family, then eaten the dinner off their plates and men who’d worked three jobs for a lifetime, so their children wouldn’t have to. Bitterman just didn’t get it, how anyone could conclude that they were all of a kind, that they were different and less. He wished he could, it saved on the wear and tear.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw the Lufer Timmons file on the desk and a note saying no file on that Watkins. Maybe he was his mother’s pride and joy.
Lufer Timmons had been raised by strangers, starting with his parents and moving on to a series of foster homes, residential treatment centers, detention centers and jails. Now at seventeen, he was well on his way to evening the score with a number of crimes to his credit starting with the attempted rape of his therapist at the age of eleven.
Bitterman studied the picture of Timmons. Six-one and a hundred sixty-eight pounds. He had a long face with deep crevices in his cheeks, thin lips, a thin nose, prominent cheekbones, and bulging froggy eyes. Bitterman pocketed one photo, Xeroxed the page of known associates and family and put the file in his desk drawer. A call to operations yielded the very pleasant news that one of his known associates was currently in custody at the downtown detention center.
* * *
Bitterman drove slowly along “The Stroll” looking for Sunshine, as in “put a little Sunshine in your day,” her marketing pitch to the curbside crawlers. Sunshine was a six-foot redhead, natural, with alabaster skin, emerald green eyes and surgically perfected tits. Bitterman had decided that Sunshine was going to be his Christmas present to himself. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to have sex with her. He just wanted to look at her, all of her, without having to hurry, like when she was on display, so he could memorize her beauty. Lately he’d been thinking about what he had to show for forty-five years, and all the fucks of a lifetime hadn’t stayed with him as sharply as his memory of her on a warm summer’s eve, leaning against a lamppost, trying to stay one lick ahead of a fast-melting vanilla cone. Her tongue moving rapidly up the sides of the cone until anticipating defeat, she engulfed the whole mound and sucked it out of the cone. Beauty baffled Bitterman. It seemed fundamental and indivisible. He could not break down his response into pieces or explain it away by recourse to another force or power. Sunshine was perfect and her beauty touched him in a way he couldn’t avoid. He hoped that she wouldn’t be easy to find. He knew that she would turn out to have bad teeth and bray like a donkey.
Lafonzo Nellis was waiting for Bitterman in interrogation room six. Bitterman sat down and the guard left.
“So, Lafonzo. Tell me about Lufer Timmons.”
“Fuck you.”
“Glad we got that cleared up. Let me give you some context, here, Lafonzo, before you get into more trouble than you can get out of. Because it’s Christmas, God gave me three wishes. The first is a known acquaintance of Lufer Timmons in custody, that’s you. The second is to have you locked up but not papered. The third is up to you. See, if you don’t talk to me, that’s okay. I hear that Lufer is a reasonable man, fair with his friends, not likely to do anything rash. I’m gonna leave here, head over to 6th and O and start asking about Lufer, and talking loud about how much help you were to me. The street bull who brought you in hasn’t papered you yet. He can let you go and he doesn’t have to explain a thing. You’re just DWOP: Dropped Without Prosecution. Now, I hear that a lot of your buddies saw you get busted and righteously, too. How you gonna explain being out of here right after we talk? Huh?”
“You ain’t got the
juice to make that happen.”
“Oh, yeah. You been around, Lafonzo. Let’s get a reality check here. You know that a street bull’s got two jobs. His shift and court time. Court time is time and a half. You sit on your butt, you drink coffee, you tell lies, you hit on the chippies, nobody’s shooting at you, and it’s time and a half. Now, I just promised that guy I’d list him as a witness on my next two homicide trials. They’re usually three or four days each. Easy time, easy money. What do you got to offer him?”
Lafonzo had a friend who was a cop and he’d pocketed $100,000 in court time and he’d only made three arrests all year. Lafonzo had a vision of trying to ’splain everything to Lufer. Lafonzo made his mind up immediately and forever. “Okay, okay. What do you want to know?”
“We’ll start with the easy stuff. I got a picture of Lufer from his last arrest. Look at it, tell me if he’s changed any.”
He slid the picture across the table. Lafonzo didn’t pick it up. “Yeah, that’s him. He ain’t changed none.”
“Okay, so tell me about him. What’s he like?”
“He’s a crazy man. I mean, what you want to know? He’s in the Crew, 6th and O. You know what that means. I don’t got to tell you. Let’s just leave it at this, if there’s trouble, Lufer fixes it. Period. Understand?”
“We’re getting there. If I was to go lookin’ for him, where would I find him?”
“Dude moves around a lot. See, there’s plenty of other people, like to find him, too, you see what I’m saying. If he has a pad, it’s a secret to me.”
“What kind of car does he drive?”
“A ’Vette, a black one.”
“You know the year, the tags?”
“No, man. Why should I care?”
Bitterman knew he’d find no such car legally registered to Timmons.
“Okay, where does he hang out? I’m gonna put a man at 6th and O with his picture every day from now on. So where else will he show up?”
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