The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  There was a long breath on the other side of the phone, and when she spoke again, Danny could hear she was having trouble holding it together.

  “It’s what I should have done. Throw stones. He’s not a mean boy, Darius.”

  “No, he’s not, Jelan. He’s not a hard case.”

  He heard her break down then, a liquid rasp in her voice. “He threw in with stupid men, but he’s just a boy. He can be sweet, he doesn’t have that violence in him.”

  “Jelan, I’ll look into this, okay?”

  There was a long pause while she collected herself. When she finally spoke again, her voice was quiet, resigned. “Thank you, Danny.”

  “I’ll come see you. I’ll talk to some people I know who know Darius.” He’d almost called him Soap again. “I’ll come see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Yes, thank you. My mother is beside herself.”

  “I can imagine, Jelan. But I’m glad you called me.” He stopped short. Where had that come from? He hadn’t thought of Jelan in years before bringing her up to Soap the other night, and now there she was in his head and it made him feel strange. A little light-headed, aided and abetted by the wine and the lack of food and sleep. Well, at least she missed it. Whatever was in his voice.

  “Thank you so much. You can’t imagine what it’s like for us to live with this worry.”

  Rogan finally came in, and Danny told him about the call. John squinted, shifting his eyes right and left while he thought. They went over everything again, Asa bringing Soap to Danny, the tip-off about the gun and Darnell and Trey and the Nortes. Danny was edgy, pissed off. This was supposed to be his victory lap for getting Green Lane off the street, but he had the feeling again he’d been caught in something.

  “I didn’t tell her I’d just seen him.”

  “No.”

  “This doesn’t look good, John.”

  Rogan scowled, his heavy brows dropping until his eyes were slits. “I don’t see it.”

  “It would have to be Trey and Darnell. Are they smart enough to have gotten to Soap that fast? Kept it this quiet?”

  “When’s the last time anyone saw him?”

  “The sister says he didn’t take his mother to church. Sunday morning. So, from Saturday night.”

  “When did you talk to him?”

  Danny looked away. The waitress came, and Rogan ordered Jameson’s and Danny got another wine. When she left, Rogan leaned in.

  “Whatever happened to Soap, it was in process before you ever got involved. Either they knew he was going to the cops, or if they got to him the same night, they heard about it awful fast. Either way, not your fault, Danny.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but I never even thought about it. Never did one thing to make sure he’d be protected.”

  “First of all, we don’t know what happened. He could be holed up somewhere. I mean, he came in and told you about his buddies, what they were up to. He should have at least suspected they’d be a little miffed. Fuck, he could be down the shore drinking Tanqueray while we worry about his scrawny ass.”

  Danny nodded, and they sat in silence while the waitress brought their drinks. They sat wedged into a corner with their backs to the wall, looked up every time someone walked in. Old instincts from their days on the street. Gunfighters.

  Rogan looked at Danny. “Who set up the meeting? Asa?”

  Danny nodded. “At Rodi’s, that bar he hangs in, out on Ridge. What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Asa’s given me good tips over the years. We go back.”

  “Yeah, I know you go back.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Nothing, Jesus.” Rogan held up his hands. “You just gotta ask, Danny.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know. You don’t have to tell me. I fucking ask.”

  “And?”

  Danny moved his shoulders in his suit as if his clothes didn’t fit right. “And I don’t know, okay? I ask myself why he does what he does and I don’t know. We were friends. His father took off and he hung around our house. He was always a schemer, but I don’t hear his name around anything major. He’s just, you know, in the neighborhood. Maybe gets a high off putting me onto these things.”

  Rogan sat and watched, holding his sweating glass in one pale fist. His face closed, his belly pressing the table. It was the pose Danny thought of as Irish Buddha.

  Danny picked up his drink, put it down. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Looked at Rogan looking back at him. “Oh, you know? Don’t fucking start with me.”

  Chris followed the Africans. There were two guys, a shorter guy, big across the shoulders with close-cropped hair who did all the talking, and a taller guy who didn’t say much of anything but who had wild, long dreadlocks and a print shirt that made him easy to pick out in crowds. Chris had followed guys Asa was doing business with before, mostly Mexican guys who hung around Ninth Street in South Philly, but these guys moved all over the city. He watched them talk to a bunch of tall, skinny guys on Germantown Avenue, two of them with what Chris guessed were Muslim robes. Then they drove down to University City and ate at a restaurant with colorful paintings and posters for Ethiopia on the walls. He walked by the door while they were in there, thinking it would mostly be a black crowd, but it looked like a lot of kids, probably from Penn, and the smell made him wish he’d sat down and ordered something. The short guy got into some kind of argument with the waitress, pointing to a plate and maybe getting into how it wasn’t like back home. The girl just smiled and shrugged, looking over her shoulder at the kitchen, and Chris felt bad for her, this know-it-all giving her shit about the food.

  The Africans had come to do business with the Dominicans, the Nortes, but the Nortes were gone and they’d do business with Asa now. Asa had gotten the number from Freddie and set it all up, and in a few hours they’d be at some derelict hotel on North Broad doing the deal. They might not like it, but what were they going to do? They had dope and needed to unload it, and the Dominicans were gone, gone, like they’d never existed.

  Back in the car he followed the two Africans along Fairmount and hung back when they made a couple of quick turns down Eighth and then east again on Green. The tall kid with the wild hair went into a house and was gone for a while. Neighborhood boys began to congregate around the Navigator, trying to get Chris talking and making motions for him to roll down the window, so he pulled out and coasted down Green, circling back up Seventh and stopping at a corner in front of a mural of some guy with old-time clothes who must have lived in the neighborhood once. Probably a long time ago, ’cause the guy was white.

  Chris watched the tall, skinny African guy talk to a guy wearing a desert camo jacket over unlaced Timberlands, his attention drifting to the weird-looking face painted on the wall. He tried to read the inscription out of the corner of his eye, but all he got was something about somebody called Hop-Frog. He thought the guy in the picture looked a little froggy and could see people calling him that. Chris had known a couple guys named Frog, one black and one white. He didn’t know how the black guy got his name, but the white guy had got his by flipping out when somebody’s boyfriend pulled a gun on him up in the Lucien Blackwell Homes and jumping right out of his sneakers trying to run away. Chris remembered the guy, Frog telling the story on himself, making them all laugh at some bar on Fairmount. Patting his chest to show his heart beating fast.

  Up ahead the African kid walked with the guy from Seventh Street in the camo jacket, who looked both ways up and down the street while the kid counted off bills and put them in the older man’s pink hand. The guy in the jacket made the money disappear and put his hand out again, and the African stood still for a moment before pulling more money out of his pocket. It made Chris think about money, about the scraps he got from Asa, and he got a strange, hollow feeling, knowing that whatever he was making was a tiny fraction of what other people were getting, of what Asa was getting. A fraction of what he’d been promised.

  When Chris focused ag
ain, the guy in the jacket was opening the trunk of a beater Audi with holes eaten out of the rear bumper by rust. The two men stood for a minute by the open trunk; then the African kid nodded and handed the guy more money and they shook hands and everybody went away happy. Chris flipped open his phone and called Asa, who told him to come in and meet him. He started to say something else, but Chris wasn’t listening. He was thinking about Frog, the kid, running hard down Brown Street in his socks, his ass clenched, his head low, waiting to get shot. Wondering, was it worth it? Wondering, how good-looking was the girl?

  CHAPTER

  9

  Orlando stepped out of the hospital and into the sunlight and looked toward Ridge Avenue. He was wearing a green scrub shirt they’d given him up on the fifth floor under his black leather jacket. His shirt was gone, shredded and bloody, and they’d thrown it away when he’d come in the night before. At his neck the stitched furrow stung and itched, and he lifted the shirt from time to time as he walked, checking on the wad of bandages taped to his shoulder.

  He stood at the curb for a minute and watched a big Lexus SUV idle at the curb, the driver lost behind smoked glass. As he walked south toward Ridge the car moved, keeping pace, and Orlando stopped after a few car lengths and turned, too tired and too sore to run. He could hear a song playing from inside the car, muffled, and it took him a minute to recognize the lyrics. Some group from long ago that his brother liked. History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men. He remembered his brother singing it in his high, cracked voice, holding an empty Pepsi bottle to his pale lips like a microphone, making exaggerated faces, maybe like he thought a rock star would.

  Orlando limped a few more steps, then sighed and turned as the smoked window opened, trying to prepare himself for whatever was behind it. He was tired, his shoulder ached, and he thought, If this is it, okay. I’m no fucking good to another living soul anyway. He watched the window go down, heard an electric motor whirring with its insect buzz. He almost closed his eyes, ready for the percussive slap of whatever bullet was coming his way, but at the end he just cocked his head and watched.

  Asa and Angel were talking when Chris came up on them in a parking garage off South in Old Town. Chris could hear their voices and slowed as he went up the ramp, realizing they didn’t know he was there and listening to the conversation echo off the cement blocks, the place cool and damp in the heat of the day. He dropped to one knee and listened, hearing his own name while he pretended to tie his shoe.

  Angel was talking a lot, for Angel. “. . . not my kind of deal,” he was saying. “You don’t listen when I talk, do you? I tell what I do, and what I don’t do, and I’m not after getting gummed up in some deal I don’t know anything about.”

  “You know about it because I’m telling you about it.” There was a silence, and Chris could picture Angel doing that stare, like you were too stupid to bother explaining things to, so Asa kept going. “I need you on this. This deal. This deal with the Africans is a lot of money. Think about it.”

  “What about the walthead with the muscles? He’s the one you want for playing games.”

  “No, Chris isn’t smart enough. He’ll fuck it up without you watching.”

  “Right, so, why don’t you watch him?”

  There was a pause, and Chris heard a match struck. He heard Asa’s voice, low, intense, but couldn’t make everything out. He heard bits of it. The Irishman’s flinty consonants, the rolling music of Asa’s bullshit. His boss’s voice going up hard over two syllables, punctuating each sentence. “Fuckup,” Chris heard him say. “Fuckup.”

  The guy at the wheel of the Lexus said he was George Parkman Sr. and asked Orlando to get in the car. Orlando looked back at the hospital, shielding his eyes from the sun. Parkman shifted in the seat, but Orlando couldn’t sort out whether it was embarrassment or impatience.

  “Look, I just . . .” Parkman shrugged. “I didn’t know Collins was crazy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me just, I don’t know. Let me buy you lunch.”

  “Nah, we’re cool.”

  Parkman opened the door and got out. He was tall, big across the shoulders. He put out a hand. “Just give me a couple minutes, okay?” After a minute he dropped the hand and looked down, stealing glimpses like a guilty dog. Orlando shook his head.

  They went to Le Bus on Main Street in Manayunk, a place the older man had clearly been before. Orlando glanced at the menu and put it down, then turned his head to watch the street, keeping the guy in the corner of his eye. The guy put the menu down with a decisive slap, then watched the waitress as she moved around, snapping his head up to call her over, like don’t waste my fucking time.

  When she came over, the man pointed at Orlando and did the headshake thing again, as if he came from a planet where that was how they communicated their primary needs. Orlando shrugged and ordered tea, and the guy put in some kind of complicated salad order with dressing on the side. The guy kept looking around the room, as if for people he knew, and Orlando frankly watched him now, since the guy was looking everywhere but at him.

  Finally the guy flicked his eyes over Orlando and then locked his hands behind the chair, pushing out his chest. The guy looked prosperous, with an expensive haircut and clear blue eyes and one of those watches that has a bunch of dials, but Orlando recognized the manner—guarded, surreptitious, impatient—as junkie, and wondered if he was an alcoholic or had some other jones that came out to play when he was alone.

  “You know what happened.” Orlando just stared, and the guy said, “To my son,” after a beat, and Orlando dipped his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, yeah, thanks.” Because what else was Orlando going to say? Parkman looked around the room, sheepish, like a kid caught stealing, and then he said, “You know, that guy, Collins? I didn’t know he was crazy.”

  “Yeah, you said that.”

  “Well, I didn’t. And I didn’t send him to do, you know, that.” Fast, like he was spitting, and his lips were twisted like the words were bitter in his mouth. Pointing vaguely at the hump of bandages on Orlando’s shoulder.

  “He said he’d look into it. I had no fucking idea he’d do . . .” He shrugged, waved a hand at Orlando sitting there in his mold-green OR scrub shirt. “He thought you knew something.”

  “I got that.”

  The waitress brought bread and the guy tore it with his hands. Took a long sip of red wine that left a dark mustache that the guy licked at.

  “But, you know.”

  “What?”

  “You know why we had to ask, right?”

  And that was why they were here. Sorry my crazy fucker friend tried to punch your ticket, but, while you’re bleeding, just what the fuck do you know, anyway? Orlando smiled, and the guy hung his head, doing the whipped dog look again. Orlando saw that for the money and the expensive haircut and the nice distressed-leather shoes, this guy was one button to press after another, and it was like recognizing a long-lost relative. Another member of the tribe.

  Orlando said, “I told that crazy fuck, and I’ll tell you, I don’t know anything. I haven’t seen Michael in like two years.”

  “But they were there, a block away. George Jr. and Michael.”

  Orlando shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that, mister.” He lifted his hands. “I’m sorry about what happened to your boy, but I got nothing for you.” He dropped his hands to the table and pushed forward to stand up, but the guy put a hand on his, and the touch was like being burned, Parkman’s pink hand hot as the top of a stove.

  “Okay, wait.”

  Orlando sagged back into the chair. He said, “Look, the cops got somebody for this. It was on TV.”

  “Was it them? The papers said the one was, you know. Had an alibi. So did they really do it?”

  Orlando shrugged. “I don’t know. I told you. Look, this was my brother’s kid got shot, you don’t think I’d tell you if I knew? You don’t think I’d tell my o
wn brother?”

  “Okay, all I’m saying is look at it, okay? The cops, they got a million things to do. I deal with the city all the time and it’s just a bunch of bureaucrats. They get the wrong guys, they get the right guys, do they even give a shit?”

  Orlando sat and looked across the table, and Parkman’s eyes were suddenly rimmed with pink.

  “All I’m saying is,” but then the man shrugged and wiped at his eyes and sniffed. He lowered his head and fat tears dropped onto his slacks, darkening the khaki. Orlando waited, and then Parkman started talking, his head still down. “I was thinking, I don’t know him. I don’t know my own son. I want you to find out about him because I don’t know anything about it. Was he on drugs? Was he just doing something stupid, because he was, I don’t know, weird?” He lifted his head and looked hard at Orlando. Looked around him and said in a low voice, “You’re a drug addict. Collins didn’t lie about that.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “You know these people. You know the people at that house and the people who shot at them. You can tell me if my son was buying drugs. Or using drugs. He hung out with all these weird kids, with makeup on and crap. I don’t know. I tried to get him into sports, he wouldn’t do it. You know what to look for and I don’t know the first fucking thing about any of it.”

  Orlando shook his head, looked out at the street. He could smell rich food and it was making him queasy and he’d have to get moving soon. “Mister, I don’t know what to do for you.”

  “I’ll give you twenty thousand dollars.” They looked at each other, and Parkman was looking defiant, his chin up, as if he’d been dared to do something stupid. He’d surprised himself, Orlando could see. It was plain on his face he hadn’t meant to offer that much money. Then he shook his head, reconciling himself to what he’d promised.

  “Twenty thousand dollars?”

  “I need to know about my son. I need to know what happened.”