He laughed again, his good nature struggling to remain buoyant, and he began reading aloud the new DA’s trumpet call in the Times.
“Culture Killing Will Stop,” by Jimmy Padino…“Politically motivated would be too mild an explanation…Racial bigotry resurgent…The musical loss incalculable…We will defend our cultural treasures in New York…The death penalty is clearly deserved, and we should as soon as possible reinstate capital punishment in New York. There is nothing arbitrary about murder, murder is final, and there should be nothing arbitrary about its punishment…Our great artists must not be intimidated. We will all stand up and be counted.”
Pulling out all the stops, pounding the mighty organ of righteousness, every majestic pipe blasting away at the top of the register, the new DA wasn’t one to let a good crisis go to waste. His opinion piece was museum-quality, world-class chutzpah.
Feeling foolish reading his successor’s puffery, looking almost as if he’d caught himself doing something unseemly, Cecil King tossed the paper aside.
“Senator,” Frank Murphy said. “I’d like to get a head start. The cars are ready downstairs. I’d like to take different routes, drive around a bit, no indication of where we’re actually heading.”
“Crazy, isn’t it?” the senator-elect said. “Like we’re losing touch with what’s really real.”
But it’s a real enough force, Flo thought. These pressures were undeniable, even if they were as invisible as the motion of the earth beneath their feet. The new senator and the police were flying into this almost blind, nearly winging it, fueled by fear and a will to lose no more.
7:52 A.M.
They accompanied the senator-elect down in the elevator.
In the building’s lobby, a single patrolman was waiting. He led them to the entrance and held the door open for them.
“Senator! Senator!”
The shouts caught them entirely by surprise. Happy, exuberant, worshipful. An admirer, a tall African American man, was waving a pen and a picture of Cecil King and was standing only a few feet from them on the sidewalk.
“Please sign it, Senator, please.”
Cecil King turned and beamed at the man. This was a pol’s reality as it should be.
Flo Ott and Frank Murphy stepped up on each side of Cecil King, their eyes locked on the man’s hands.
“Sure,” the senator-elect said. “Who do I dedicate it to?”
“Claiborne. God bless you, Senator. Keep the faith.”
Cecil King signed his photograph, a standard campaign glossy, and the man stood there, his eyes wide with admiration and gratitude.
“Thank you, Senator. May the Lord bless you.”
Frank Murphy gave instructions to the patrolman. “We’re doing a West Side synagogue, an East Side church, lunch, back here for MS 51 and PS 107. Then another church and home. You get relieved at what time?”
“Lunch.”
“Good. Tell the next guy.”
They piled into the car and drove off down Eastern Parkway toward Grand Armp Plaza, leaving the senator’s admirer on the sidewalk, smiling at the patrolman and writing on the back of the photograph…lunch…MS 51…PS 107.
He circled “PS 107.”
8:06 A.M.
At the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, just off Park Row, Flo Ott switched cars, joining homicide detective Sergeant Marty Keane for the morning.
She planned to link up with the senator-elect for the afternoon in Brooklyn, but right now she and Marty Keane were meeting the late Ballz Busta’s accountant, Vincent J. Narcissi, at the offices of the deceased’s record company.
The Manhattan SoHo offices of B Busta Records were designed by Azalea Butte in a vaguely Moorish style, Marrakesh meets South Miami. A nearly seven-foot Nigerian, in a green turban and a long white cotton robe, opened a pair of iron gates right outside the elevator on the ninth floor. He led the detectives through the lobby, where a forest of bonsai trees and potted palms glistened, embroidered with strings of tiny winking white lights, the air heavy with the fragrance of burning incense and thick scents of fresh-cut yellow, red, and white roses, rows of silver buckets full of flowers.
They passed into a room alive with pale shadows cast from filigree screens of carved ivory.
No desks, no chairs.
Instead, lining the walls were brocaded banquettes piled high with silk pillows laced with filaments of silver and gold.
The floor was thick with overlapping antique Oriental rugs, pools of soft woven colors.
On a round, hammered-brass tabletop, a sweating gold ice bucket held a bottle of Krug Reserve champagne. Next to the bucket, four Baccarat crystal champagne flutes and a laptop computer.
Tapping the keys, B Busta Records’ chief financial officer, Vincent J. Narcissi, accountant, a yellow-skinned Jamaican. He wore a long white woolen robe not unlike the Nigerian porter’s jellaba, but no turban. His eyeglasses were tortoiseshell, his accent unadulterated Brixton, South London.
“Watch’er. Have a seat, Officers. Relax, make yourselves comfortable here. Bloody bollocksed-up around this place, I can tell you, good and nasty ever since Ballz—please, God help me, but I can’t even bear to think about it yet. I do hope you get the bastard, that crazy bugger who did it. And get him soon, before the brothers on the street, before Ballz’s fans find him and lynch him, whoever he is. I’m all yours. I want to see you get the swine who did this, I want to see a trial and conviction. We have to set a good example. This could prove incredibly negative for our business over the long run. But look, I’ve got all our financial reports right here for you. And we can load a memory stick with anything you want. Here you go.”
He slid the laptop across the brass table to Marty Keane.
“Mint tea or champagne?” the accountant said.
“Tea, please.” Flo opened her briefcase. “We’ve got a warrant here.”
“No problem, Captain. Everything’s yours. We’re totally open and cleaner than a shark’s tooth.” He took the warrant from Flo’s hand. “I’ll pass it to our lawyers. You’re welcome to see everything we’ve got in these offices.”
“We’re from homicide, not rackets. Rackets will be here soon. They’ll decide what they want to see. Destruction of any data—you’re on notice now—will be prosecuted.”
CFO Vincent J. Narcissi removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Tea will be here in a sec. No champagne, you’re sure, Captain?”
The detectives ignored his offer. Marty Keane tapped away at the computer keys and scrolled through disbursements.
His first thought…Horseshit on a platter.
His second: “His wife gets an additional ten thousand a month? Walking around money?”
A possible source of payments to a killer? Christine Smith certainly had her reasons.
The accountant said, “Mrs. Smith, you mean?”
“Right. His wife.”
“No, that’s his mother. Ten K a month. Till she dies, that’s always been the deal.”
His mother. Flo was surprised. However often the word “mother” was spoken as a form of abuse, no one had yet uttered a word about a real mother of Owen Smith. Not a mention from his wife or his mother-in-law or from the family lawyer, Golden Bobby, about any other relative of the late Owen Smith.
“You got an address?” Flo said.
“Somewhere in Brooklyn,” the accountant said. “Let me have a look.” He retrieved the laptop. A few keystrokes, and he passed the computer back to Marty Keane.
“Bed-Stuy,” Marty said.
Next stop, Flo thought.
“Have you fired any employees recently?” she asked the accountant. “Anyone here who might’ve had a grudge against him?”
“Vous jestez, Captain. We all loved him. Everyone kissed the ground he walked on. And no one ever gets fired around here, we’re extremely careful about all our hires. Zero disgruntlement. Quite frankly, Captain, in my opinion, it would have to be a madman. He had no enemies. Zero. None.”
Y
eah, right. But Flo said, “That’s great, thanks, Mr. Narcissi. Look, we got to move on now, and we’ll be back again soon.”
“You want the whole computer? Please, take it with you.”
Useless, Marty thought. “Rackets will be here. Give it to them.”
“Sorry you have to run. Tea’s just on its way.” The accountant’s face sagged like a Bed-Stuy tenement.
“We’ll take a raincheck,” Flo said. “Next time.”
CFO Vincent J. Narcissi summoned the seven-foot Nigerian, who led the detectives back through the palm and bonsai jungle out to the elevator.
On their way down, Flo said to Marty, “We get back to Brooklyn, I’ll need a car and driver for Bed-Stuy. Tell Frank I’ll catch him at lunch at the Kings’ apartment, but I might be late.”
They stepped outside into a sudden sleet storm.
The drive back to downtown Brooklyn—Marty on the phone, Flo drafting the urgent request for a search warrant—was treacherous and slow, the streets slick with ice.
9:20 A.M.
Mrs. Kitty Smith, the victim’s mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was a surprise.
Flo grew intensely curious about this woman. She felt any mother who’d lost a son to violence, a son as wildly successful in his business as Owen Smith/Ballz Busta, a man extravagantly uninhibited with his women, a son who’d kept his mother distant to the point of secrecy, her pension steady if small considering his wealth…a woman like this could deliver some answers.
“But hang on,” accountant Narcissi had said to Flo as they were leaving. “Don’t get her hopes up. He didn’t leave his mum anything but the monthly payments, same amount till she dies.”
Mrs. Kitty Smith lived in a front-to-back apartment on the ground floor of a large brownstone building that had seen its good days as a townhouse several generations before.
She received her police visitor in her bedroom, seated up in bed like a queen, impoverished but in control, a semi-invalid air about her thin reclining figure.
Otherwise, she appeared about as incapacitated as a Comanche brave on the warpath, her makeup right up to the job: slanted eyes, lashes thick with mascara, dark brown pupils heavily flecked with yellow, limpid and alert as the eyes of a young cat, although she looked to be on the far side of eighty.
A lean and clever face powdered party-rouge.
Her lips, for all her advanced years, were slippery, a glossy vibrant chorus-girl red, and her hair was pale reddish, almost rosy, a spry spray of thin wispy curls.
The room smelled of dust and old paper and of Mrs. Kitty Smith’s perfume (vanilla extract) and of steam heat and morning tea with lemon.
“Now,” Mrs. Smith said, getting right down to business. “Tell me what you expect from me, Officer. Who did it, right? Well, don’t ask me. I don’t know nothing about that world outside. Evil, only evil out there. Envy and malice and spite. And greed and filth. I don’t know nothing about any of that. And I don’t wanna know. He was a grown-up man, out there. But in here…” She tapped her chest, thin and bony, at the spot over her heart. “…in here, he was still a young boy. Even in death. I ain’t been invited to no funeral. They don’t want to know me, they never did. I didn’t hear nothing about what happened to him, excepting what’s on TV, and that’s mainly disgusting. You got to know more than I do, Officer, don’t you? You’re a cop.” She paused to sneeze and to wipe her nose with a lacy pink handkerchief tucked up the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I hate cold weather. Wish I could go someplace warm. But at least the steam heat here works. Warm enough for you?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Flo. “I’m trying to find out the truth about your son, Mrs. Smith. So we can arrest and convict his killer.”
“Truth?” The old woman coughed. “What’s truth anyway? I never been no snitch for cops. But after this, you want truth? I’ll show you truth. Most people run from truth like Dracula from a holy cross. But I’m gonna roll you some clean dice right now, so look here. Just look at this.”
This was a book.
The old woman reached over and plucked it from the shelf of a small bookcase next to her bed. A dog-eared paperback book, Kim by Rudyard Kipling.
And her tears started to flow, uncontrolled.
“You’re kind, Officer, a real kind person, I can see that. You got your job, and I’m not trying to give you no hard time here. Thank you for whatever you can do. I just want you to know him exactly like I knew him.”
But for Flo nothing was as straightforward as just wanting to know him as his mother once did: the man was clearly far more complex than the boy. There were whole landscapes she wanted to explore, and Mrs. Kitty Smith might be yet another guide through the wilderness of what had been Owen Smith/Ballz Busta’s life. Flo wanted his mother to talk as much as she could, and she’d listen to the old woman’s stories until the shadows in her detective’s mind were swept away.
She wanted confidences and understandings.
“I can just feel it,” the old woman said. “You’re a mother, too, a good mother. And you’ve known hardness, just like me. Look at this here.” She opened the paperback book. “This was his favorite book in his first school. Holy Redeemer with the nuns. The public schools around this neighborhood were always too rough. I sent my boys to Redeemer.”
The sight of the tattered book—and the mention of a Catholic school—brought to Flo’s mind her own childhood and the preferences of her parents.
The old woman opened Kim to the inside front cover. “You got to see this. Makes it understandable, kind of person he was, even as a boy. Doesn’t it? Only ten years old.”
Inside was written, in careful script, Duties & Work, and below this, right to the bottom and all the way down the other side…
Study music—6:30–7:00 a.m.
Do breakfast—7:00–7:30
Work out—7:30–8:00 (except Sunday)
Run to school—8:00–8:15
School—9:00–12:00
Run home—12:00–12:15 p.m.
Do lunch—12:15–12:40
Do dishes—12:40–12:45
Run to school—12:45–1:00
School—1:00–3:00
Run home—3:00–3:15
Practice music—3:15–5:30
Start supper—5:30–6:00
Supper—6:00–6:45
Do dishes—6:45–7:00
Homework—7:00–8:00
TV—8:00–9:30
Clean self—9:30–9:45
Sleep—9:45–6:15 a.m.
“Ten years old, remember. And I was out all day long, cleaning on a steady job at Chemical Bank. I always keep this near me,” Mrs. Smith said. “Reminder what Owen was like. A good set schedule, it just seems so safe, doesn’t it? But look, it does make everything a lot more understandable now, right?”
“Understandable?”
“Right, growing up like that, all that discipline, starting out when you’re young and when you’re as smart as Owen was. No surprise he got so far in life.”
“No, no surprise.”
“Always working, never no real trouble. They could see he’d be a success, he was their smartest boy in school, in high school, too, Saint Francis Prep, he got a music scholarship and he led the school band. They wanted him to go to a seminary, become a Franciscan priest. But we really weren’t no Catholics. I just wanted safe schools, not like the kind I got stuck in. I always remember the day I got put in an orphanage. ‘Here’s little Kitty,’ my mother said to the reverend, it was down South. Arkansas. And a tall thin man, a white man, locked his eyes on me, and a second later I was being led away, and my mother was gone, just disappeared. Poof. Vanished. I never seen her again. I was standing in a big cold room with other little colored girls, and we did exactly like we were told. ‘Take off all your clothes, girls, and set them on the floor.’ Then we stood there naked and shivering, and we watched an older girl carefully lift our clothes with a pair of wood tongs and drop it all in big pots of boiling water.
“We got marched off to another roo
m, naked, and sat on a hard bench with a sheet over our shoulders and the reverend’s wife run cold steel clippers through our hair, back and forth, back and forth, till we got shaved right down to our scalps. I sat there not saying a word, watching my dark black hair, thick and curly, fall all around me. And then they led us into another big room filled with tubs of hot water and stinking of carbolic soap. Reverend’s wife, she soaped me down good and long and scrubbed me toe to top…and then he rubbed me dry with a towel felt like sandpaper all over me. They gave us wool drawers, black socks, and a long itchy blue dress hanging down to our ankles. Then they marched us out into a yard in front of the church. ‘You’re lucky little girls to be here,’ the reverend says. ‘Now we’re all going up into God’s house, and you’re going to thank Him with all your hearts for giving you so much of His kindness and blessings.’ I didn’t cry till I went to bed that night, and I reached up and felt my head, and it was all so naked, just completely bald. I cried and cried till I fell asleep. No, didn’t want none of that when I became a momma. I wanted better, and things always get better, you know, they really do, you just have to wait and they do get better. Yes, they do. So now I got three grandchildren, yes, I have three. And I met them once by accident. Accident for them, not me. Lawrence, Henry, and Miriam. Sweethearts. I sat and sat over by the park side, just up from their big house. Montgomery Place, very, very fancy place, too. They’re the only people of color on that block, the Smith family, I bet you my gold tooth. The kids come out with their Chinese maid or whatever she is, Juanita the kids call her. And I followed them to the Third Street playground, and I sat there. I just sat there right by the swings. They never get tired of those swings, and I watched and I watched until I couldn’t take it no more. That’s when I went over and started talking to them. And that’s when I learned their names, my three grandchildren. Lawrence. Henry. Miriam. And she is so pretty, Miriam, she’s gonna break a whole lot of hearts someday. Haven’t talked to them since. But I seen them. I sit there, and I sit there when the weather’s good, and I catch a glimpse of them. Claiborne never met his niece and nephews, says he don’t want to neither.”
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