The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “Kevin, don’t do this.”

  “See? That’s not even my right name, Brendan. You can’t even say my name.” He shook his head then turned and walked off.

  Orlando walked up Kensington in the rain, looking up at the underside of the El and the streams of water pouring off the tracks. It was the kind of hammering rain that wouldn’t last, steaming when it hit the hot asphalt, and people hurried off the street into open doorways, the bar at the corner, the check-cashing place, some of them holding newspapers over their heads. A guy with broad shoulders pulled a red hood over his head and hunched in a doorway, watching the street. Two young kids took their turns handing him something that he palmed without making eye contact. One wore a sweatshirt with an air-brushed image of Daffy Duck smoking weed, and the other had a yellow T-shirt with something printed on it in Gothic letters like an elaborate tattoo.

  One of the kids crossed back over to the corner nearest Orlando, and he stuck his hand in his pocket and felt the tens folded there. When he got close enough to the kid that he could see his yellow T-shirt read CREEPING DEATH, he took his cash out of his pocket and held it close to his thigh. The kid made eye contact with him, held his hand out, and had taken the money when he stopped, close to the front of the check-cashing place, and pulled a cell phone out of a long pocket on his thigh and looked at it. He looked at Orlando for a beat, then stepped closer and handed him back the money.

  Orlando looked at him and then down at the cash in his hand, and the kid backed away, holding his hands at his shoulders and flashing the palms up. His eyes went over his shoulder and Orlando turned to look across the street at the big guy with the red hood pulled up. The guy shook his head slowly. Once, twice, three times, his face expressionless.

  The kid turned down the corners of his mouth and stuck his hands under his sweatshirt. “Sorry, little brother. What can you do?”

  Orlando stuck the money back in his pocket but didn’t move, looking at the kid and then back across the street. The guy across the street stood up slowly and put his hand on his hip. Up Kensington the doors opened on a maroon Olds with a custom paint job, and two tall guys got out and stood on the street. Both of them had on wraparound shades and jackets, one with oversized dreads pulled back with a bandanna, and the other wearing a hoodie that shadowed his face. They stood by the car as if awaiting a bell.

  The kid who had refused his money shook his head. “Get along, now. Live to fight another day.”

  It took three hours to get to the prison where Derrick Leon was locked up. Danny had been out before, going along with a detective who was trying to get a confession on an old case from a convicted child murderer who was set for execution in a few days. The inmate, a former schoolteacher from Scranton named Baumgardner, was a shaking mess, sweating through his prison clothes, talking nonstop, smoking. Danny went with an older guy, Matt Gialdo, who had worked the case years before, and Danny mostly watched while Gialdo tried to establish enough of a rapport with Baumgardner to find out whether his case, a young Hispanic girl found in a cardboard box in Fairmount Park, was one he had done. It went nowhere. The guy was trying to work some scheme to get a few more days before his execution and strung them along for an hour, trying to get them to talk to the state’s attorney to buy him some time and half-promising to confess to three more murders that might or might not include the little girl in the park.

  Gialdo had worked hard for an hour and a half, listening to the crazy old bastard rant, alternately blaming the murders on a kid he’d abused from his neighborhood and then hinting there were more bodies. On the way back, Gialdo had stopped at a tavern on Route 30 and had two quick Scotches and then walked off to a corner of the gravel parking lot and sobbed with frustration. Danny had driven home while the older detective snored in the passenger seat, but thinking the whole time of the image of him facing off into the trees, the tail of his rumpled coat shaking while he made terrible, strangled sounds into his fist.

  The Leon case had made Danny. Derrick Leon started out in the drug business at thirteen, selling his brother’s asthma medication cut into powder. He kept getting locked up and kept coming back out with more friends and a bigger crew that he put to work selling dope down on Fifteenth Street. He picked up his street name, Supremo, from the food market at Fifteenth and Wingohocking, the corner where he sat every day watching his crews sell Wet, what they called grass soaked in formaldehyde. But the more money he made, the more paranoid Leon got. He stabbed two of his own lieutenants because he thought they had designs on his corners, then used a hammer to kill a crackhead named Zumi who tried to pass off a xeroxed ten-dollar bill to one of Leon’s runners. Derrick Leon was seen walking away with the bloody hammer. When a young cop pulled him over on Oregon Avenue in South Philly, Leon shot the cop in the face, then went home and killed his own pregnant girlfriend and his mother and disappeared.

  The runner who got stuck with the phony ten was named DeAngelo Barnes. Leon had been hiding for two days when Asa put Barnes with Danny, and four hours later Danny walked out of the garage on Thompson with Derrick Leon in cuffs, and Danny got a promotion and a shot at the Violent Crimes Task Force. Danny could remember how scared Barnes was of Leon, the kid sitting hunched on a stool in a diner on Germantown Avenue, trying to be invisible, while Asa coaxed him into telling his story to Danny so Danny could get Derrick Leon off the street and nobody else would get his brains beat out with a hammer in the middle of Seventeenth Street.

  The prison administration building reminded Danny of a suburban vision of a fortress, a brown stone castle as imagined by somebody who normally designed office buildings and tract housing, maybe, and had the look of a large post office with turrets. Danny parked across the street and checked in. He was wearing jeans and a sport coat and checked his gun with the duty sergeant. There were forms to fill out and a few people to talk to. At the last second there was some question of whether he’d get in; some misfire in the bureaucratic mechanism had kept his name off the list of approved visitors. In the end, a pear-shaped woman in civilian dress gave him a short lecture on chain of command in the prison before he was allowed past the sally port and into a waiting room where he sat for thirty minutes and read a copy of Correctional News.

  He’d expected to have to get all the way out to SCI Greene in Waynesburg, where Pennsylvania kept its death row and most of its condemned prisoners, but Derrick Leon had been involved in an escape attempt and smuggling dope and had been transferred to Camp Hill, where he was held in segregation. When they brought him in, shackled and with leg irons, Danny saw the difference between three years inside and out. Leon’s skin had gone ashy and gray, and he’d gained weight, gotten jowly and slack-eyed from the medication they used to control the most violent inmates. Danny had forgotten Leon’s scar, a pale line that ran from his right eye in an arc along his cheek. It looked like a frozen tear, suspended in its fall.

  He moved slowly, wiping his mouth with his manacled hands before speaking, but his eyes glowed when he saw Danny, and he smiled and shook his head. “Detective Martinez. You come all the way out here to exonerate me of these charges?”

  “Hello, Derrick.” He smiled in spite of himself. “How you making it out here? Staying out of trouble?”

  “I shouldn’t complain, but I do. I do.” He looked around him at the guards. “These country-ass rednecks out here all get nervous around a strong black man still has his power. Still has his mind.”

  Danny could see Leon was, in fact, barely in control. His hands shook, and his eyes couldn’t seem to settle on anything in the room. He’d look at Danny and then away, back over his shoulder.

  “You still in touch with anyone from the neighborhood, Derrick?”

  Leon lifted his chin and lowered his eyelids, affecting the bearing of the street king he’d been years before. “I hear things. People know who I am.”

  Danny knew it wasn’t unusual for bigger criminals, names, to still retain some authority on the street. It was an issue for the prisons
, guys who were locked up but still moved drugs around or had people killed or messed with on the street.

  “You still plugged in out there, Derrick? Still moving and shaking even from all the way out here?”

  Leon let his smile fade away to a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He let his head hang. “Nah, not really. I can make things happen inside here, but on the street I’m a ghost, tell the truth. I got a cousin came up a couple times, but everybody from my corners all locked up or dead now. Your boy seen to that.”

  “My boy?”

  Derrick Leon stared, seeing things that weren’t in the room. “You know they moved up my execution? Ain’t that a bitch? Nothing better to do than to run a man to the death house.”

  “Well, you surprised?” Derrick had killed four people in twenty-four hours, the crackhead Zumi, another one of them the young cop, and Derrick’s own mother and pregnant seventeen-year-old girlfriend. He had probably killed—or had ordered killed—at least six other people before that. It was tough, Danny thought, to know how much of drug-trade killing was the bloodless calculus of power and how much was just brutal paranoia and poor impulse control.

  “Nah, that’s what I’m saying, they got to bury me.” He smacked at his chest and the chains swung and rattled. “They can’t have somebody around willing to stand up.”

  “Derrick, you think you’re here because what, you speak truth to power?”

  Leon made a gesture, throwing it all away, and the chains on his wrists clanked and sang. “We know why I’m here, don’t we, Detective? I mean, come on, give it up. I’m a dead man. There’s no games to play with me.”

  Danny shifted in his chair, felt the absence of his gun, a weightlessness at his right hip where he usually carried the holster clipped to his belt. “I drove a long way, Derrick. Say what’s on your mind.”

  “You go right now to my corners, what will you see? You’ll see runners and dopers. Not a damn thing different ’cause I’m locked up.”

  “People buy dope, Derrick. We supposed to close our eyes to that?”

  “You see what you want to see. Who put you onto me?”

  “You know I can’t say that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you who. Asa Carmody.”

  Danny shifted in his seat, tried to give nothing away.

  “He brought you somebody. Like he was just helping you out. All innocent.” Derrick Leon was almost laughing, his eyes suddenly much clearer than when he’d first shambled in. “Yeah, I see it in your poker face. He brought you, I’m going to guess it was DeAngelo Barnes.”

  Danny gave a little headshake, but he felt something like a cramp in his neck and along his jaw. Leon leaned closer, his hands on the table between them.

  “Yeah, don’t even lie, it just make you look stupid. Now, Asa Carmody hand you DeAngelo Barnes and you say thank you, Asa, you’re a good citizen, and you catch me asleep, huh? And what happened next? You don’t even know.” Leon smiled, rocking a little, the chains swaying. “How you ever make detective, anyway? I go up on death row, and DeAngelo Barnes is gone, and all my corners still open, all day, every day, and everybody still working, still slinging dope on Fifteenth Street, only now the money goes east instead of west. Never even missed a beat. I made them corners. I built them. There should be a plaque with a picture of Derrick Leon. A movie about me, like with Denzel.”

  The guards stood up behind Leon and he turned to look at them, then back at Danny. There were fast changes in his face, flickers of humor, of fear. Danny tried to imagine what it was like, how he’d be, sitting year after year on death row.

  “Yeah, I’m going to burn. They can’t wait, not a minute. Nobody ever cared this much about me before.” He stood up and held his cuffed hands out to Danny. “But I learned my lesson. See, if I had fed my enemies to you, instead of taking care of things straight up, I’d be walking around free like Asa Carmody, huh?”

  By the time it got dark Orlando was home, walking the narrow rooms and licking his lips. He’d been four places he knew to score and found himself shut out everywhere, stuck at a distance, pacing with the baggers and glueheads working their thin, scabby arms and haranguing customers and bystanders for spare change until they got run off by the jugglers.

  At Fifty-second Street, he got too close to a big runner called Evil Eye, a twitchy, angry, low-level dealer with a giant gold Ra pendant, who kicked his legs out from under him and booted him in the ass down the sidewalk while everyone on the corner laughed. He pulled himself up on skinned palms and kept moving, his cheeks burning, and they shouted insults at him until he was out of range down Market Street.

  He’d heard of guys turned off at some corners, usually base-heads who tried to run games and beat the dealers out of money, or people suspected of snitching, who seemed untrustworthy or wrong, or who were just a pain in the ass to everybody. Pestering the paying customers for handouts, or just too crazy to have around.

  Orlando, though, had been to places he thought were run by different crews, so he knew whatever word was out against him was general, and there was nothing he could do, no one to appeal to. It was a nervous business that ran on rumor and vendetta and lying so intricate it became a kind of mythology. Back at Zoe’s, he paced and wondered when she was going to get home, moving between the front windows and the stairs like a dog on patrol. By the time she came in, walking slowly, head down, the way she always was after work, he was tapping his raw hands against his thighs in a jerky bebop and his nose was running.

  She stopped on the top step of the stairs to see him there, leaning toward her, his eyes wild. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re late. We got things to do.”

  “That asshole Julian, the manager?”

  He held up a hand. “We got to go, Zoe. We got things to do. I’m stuck here, going nuts while you screw around.”

  “Will you listen to me a minute?”

  “What?”

  “Jesus, what’s up with you? What happened to your hands?” She retreated a step, and he clamped his arms to his sides in a manic simulation of stillness, his eyes moving in his head like a metronome.

  “I got shut down. Nobody will call me back. The word’s out on me or something.”

  “Where? We’ll call somebody.”

  “Everywhere. Are you fucking listening to me? Who are you going to call? We got to get somebody to front for us. These fuckers are telling each other something about me. Do you have money?” He pointed to her purse, which she pulled against her chest protectively.

  “That’s what I was trying to say. Listen, I got fired. That fucking Julian—”

  “Today? Today you get fired? What the fuck?”

  “Well, what the hell are you going to do about it? Give me shit? That’s helpful. You can’t even hold down a job, Orlando.”

  “I’m working. I’m working for that Parkman guy. I’m working every day.” He stuck one hand in his pocket to cover the shaking and stabbed out with the other toward the street. “I’m making things happen. I’m drawing lines. You don’t get it.”

  “Oh, bullshit. That’s a fucking dream and you know it. That guy’s never giving you a dime.” She stamped up the final step and leaned in toward him, her face terrible. “No, but that’s okay, I’ll just go get another fucking shitty job doing some fucking useless thing so you can float around the city all day and pretend you’re a philosopher, or a detective, or whatever the fuck it is you think you are.”

  “I’m trying to make things right. Don’t you get that? I thought you understood.”

  “This? All this bullshit? This is about your brother. You’re trying to get your brother to treat you like a human being instead of a fucking junkie cartoon. Which he’d fucking do anyway if he wasn’t such an asshole.”

  His hand jerked at the end of his sleeve and he slapped her. She dropped her purse and clapped her hand over her face. Everything fell out of the purse and rolled and clattered on the stairs, lipsticks and change, an eight-ball lighter. The razor opened, flashe
d and spun on the landing. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and bit down until he tasted blood. She dropped her eyes, bowed down slowly and retrieved her purse, moved without straightening down the stairs sweeping everything back in, and then stood up on the landing, turning from him and walking back out through the door.

  The cell reception on the turnpike was bad, fading in and out while Martinez left messages. He called the Captain and left messages, tried John a half-dozen times before reaching him, coming out of court. He talked about Derrick Leon, about Soap Williams, about DeAngelo Barnes. The call ended with a frantic chirp as the signal was lost, and then Danny called back, his voice high.

  “It was the same shit, John. I didn’t even put it together until I was in that room with Leon.”

  “You don’t know that, Danny. Have you looked at the file on Barnes? Do you even remember?”

  “I remember Asa Carmody sitting across the fucking table from me. Just like with Soap Williams. Feeding me bullshit with a teaspoon.”

  “It wasn’t bullshit. Derrick Leon was a bad guy, and so is Darnell Burns. You need to calm down and think.”

  “We have to take a look at all of this again. I don’t think Darnell did this.”

  “No one is going to want to hear that. Not the DA, not the Captain.”

  “John.”

  “Not the families of those kids that got shot.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “I don’t know shit. And neither do you.”

  “I got played. You were the one asked me if I knew why Asa was feeding me information. Well, you were right.”