The door to the ladies’ room opened, and our women came out arm in arm.
We ordered drinks, wine for us, and two more martinis for them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING right when the jail opened for visitors, I sat in the same windowless, concrete-walled room with Marie at my side. We again waited for my brother to show. Marie sat close, her head resting on my shoulder, her hand locked in mine.
She squeezed my hand. “Do you want to talk more about your brother?”
“No.”
She nodded with her head still on my shoulder.
We waited some more.
“I don’t know what happened to him, really I don’t.” I said, “He had the same of everything. Dad treated him the same as me. Dad even gave him a little preferential treatment. At least that’s what I thought at the time. Maybe not, I could’ve just been jealous.”
She didn’t nod this time, only listened.
“You know,” I said, “In high school, they called him Knight as in the Noble Knight. He played JV basketball, first string. He … ”
A lump rose in my throat at the thought of the way things could’ve turned out. How we could’ve been a family, the contented kind with holiday get-togethers and birthdays, grandkids, and growing old with each other. What the hell happened?
“Then somehow chance interceded.” I said, “Something just clicked in his head, and he went to the other side. Dropped out of school, and fell in with the likes of Papa Dee and Del Fawlkes. On the street they started calling him Not-so. He back stabbed everyone, cheated, and played dirty with anyone he dealt with. For the life of me, I don’t know why. Why would he do it? You think he was genetically predisposed?”
“Or maybe,” Marie said, “the death and loss of his family took that long to manifest the emotional symptoms. It happens. It does, Bruno.”
“Maybe.”
The door opened and Not-so came shuffling in with his chains rattling. He looked haggard, as if he’d not slept at all. He wrangled the white resin chair around and sat, his eyes locked on mine.
The deputy, dressed in a Class B uniform with a green-and-black cloth name patch that said “B. Stanford” over his right breast, closed the door. Not the same deputy as the day before.
Noble started first. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. Something inside me, something I don’t have any control over, just took me by the throat and … I’m sorry.” He broke eye contact with me and looked at Marie. “And to you, beautiful lady, I hope you can forgive me for my behavior. You must think I’m some kind of an animal by the way I acted. Especially the first time we meet. I’m so sorry, I was a fool.”
“It’s okay,” Marie said. “I understand. You don’t have anything to be forgiven for.”
“Noble?” He looked back at me when I said, “Dad told me about the cut-out you used, Tommy Tomkins.”
Noble squirmed a little in his chair. “Yes, that’s the way Dad wanted it. He said it would be okay if we communicated that way. I didn’t mean to put you or your family at risk.”
“I know, I know, it’s okay, I understand, but we went by there yesterday and he’s laid up in bed on a respirator, has been for the last year or so.”
Noble’s eyes focused into the distance as his mind tried to process this new information. “That doesn’t make sense. The letters went through without any problem. Maybe his nurse passed them on for him?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
I didn’t think the nurse did; the service rotated the nurses on a regular basis. I let it go. “So we’re here now, tell us what’s going on.”
“I didn’t think you’d come back. I didn’t sleep all night because I thought I screwed up royal. You had no reason to come back, Bruno. I know that. I owe you for this. I’ll repay you somehow, I promise. You hear, I promise, you have my word.”
“I know, my brother. How can we help?”
He nodded, and looked down at his hands, shame plain in his expression. “I’m not proud of how I ended up here. I’m not. You were right yesterday when you said I was the one who shot those two boys. I did. I’m guilty of that and I’m paying for it. I have no problem with that. Though, I disagree with you, I had to shoot those boys. It was them or me and I’m not proud of it. I did other things though, things I’m not proud of, and like I said, I deserve to be in here. No doubt about it.”
His words cut me deep, his admission, the words I’d thrown at him in anger, repeated back in this humble way. What Marie said only seconds ago, about what had motivated my brother—the loss of his family—I’d never thought about that event and how it must’ve impacted him. Of course, that’s what had happened, delayed post-traumatic stress. I’d read about it. Why had that obvious solution eluded me all this time? I’d been too close to it, or maybe I, too, had been impacted by the experience that Christmas morning. I went around and sat on the edge of the table, put my hand on his, and helped him up. I hugged my brother for the first time in twenty-five years. He couldn’t hug back. The waist chains restricted him. He put his head on my shoulder and pushed down. We stayed that way a long time. He finally said, “I love you, bro.”
“I love you too.” I let go and leaned back against the table. “We don’t have much time. Tell us what’s happening.”
He sat down and nodded, then took a deep breath and looked up at me. “I did it again. I somehow got myself in deep trouble without even trying. Got in trouble out there, when I’m in here. It’s amazin’, isn’t it?”
I said nothing and waited for him to tell it.
“I worked for Papa Dee. You know that part already.”
“Dee’s dead,” I said. “He got gunned, payback for the hate he inflicted upon all those thousands of lives, ruined them with bullets and rock coke and his hateful ways.”
“I know,” Noble said. “We heard about Papa Dee and Del getting gunned in here, that someone took them both off the board. They never solved it.”
He paused for a long moment.
“Okay, so here it is,” he said. “I was movin’ up in Dee’s organization. I’d made it to second under Del. It was Del, then Fat Chuck, then me. Del didn’t like the way Papa Dee had been askin’ my opinion. I could see it in Del’s eyes. Fat Chuck, he could care less, he ran those two gamblin’ houses off Central and never got close to the dope. That was where all the big money was anyway, in the dope. Del, he was just overprotective of his precious Papa Dee.”
Noble again paused.
We waited.
“Okay,” he said. “What happened was that Papa Dee slapped around his girl, banged her up pretty good. She was no bigger than a minute.” Noble gritted his teeth in between the words; telling this angered him even today. He said, “She needed a hospital, but Dee wouldn’t allow it. It was too dangerous. If we took her to the hospital, Johnny Law might tumble to Papa’s brutal ways and toss his happy ass in the can. Papa Dee called in Grover Porter. You remember old Grover, don’t ya, Bruno?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He lived in that boarded-up library and gambled his life away, right? Wait, Wait. Okay, now I remember, Grover came to me when I was still working patrol, said this girl needed help. He said the girl belonged to Papa. Yeah, that’s right. As I remember it, I talked to her, tried to get her to go into a battered women’s shelter. She’d have none of that no matter how hard I tried to convince her. Her name was …” I turned my head to the ceiling and closed my eyes. “Her name was Sasha, she was eighteen or nineteen, and she—”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s her,” Noble said, “I didn’t know about that, that she talked with you. That’s really crazy, ain’t it, that we’re talkin’ about the same girl all these years later?”
“Not really, I worked patrol in the same area and—” I stopped. The complete memory of her bubbled to the surface: her soft, gentle voice, her porcelain-smooth skin, her deep-brown eyes, large and vulnerable. She’d been one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. I opened my eyes and looked
at Noble. Now I thought I knew what had attracted my older brother to the wrong side of the street.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DEPUTY B. STANFORD stuck his head in. “Time’s up.”
Marie stood and shot him a smile. “Please, could we just have a few more minutes?”
The deputy shook his head, “No. Hell no. This mope isn’t even supposed to be on this side of the jail. My ass is hung out a country mile on this.”
“I know,” she said, “and we really appreciate it, we really do, but we just need a few more minutes, please?”
“I’m only doin’ this as a favor for Johnny Mack. Tell him he owes me big.” He closed the door and left us alone.
“Hurry,” I said.
“Okay, I … I fell hard for her. I know it’s sappy and I never admitted it before, but … I mean, I fell in love the first time I saw her at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. She came into Roscoe’s with Papa Dee and Del and bam! Jus’ like that I knew I couldn’t live without her. Call me a fool, I don’t care. That’s how it was, crazy jus’ like that, bam!
“Bruno, I couldn’t eat my chicken, I just stared at her. Even after she got up and left, I couldn’t eat. I followed them out to their Lincoln. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a woman would go with—”
“Noble.”
“Right, right sorry. Anyway, I left school and I started slingin’ rock for Pigman, a guy way down the food chain from Del and Papa Dee. It took two years, but I worked my way up just on the hope of getting another look at her. And I did get a look at her every now and then. I did. I even had a few words with her here and there.
“Ah, all right, all right, no, that’s a lie. I’m older now, smarter, I can tell you the truth. I wanted her from the start. All of her. She’s all I thought about every waking minute. I never gave up thinkin’, tryin’ to put somethin’ together, some sorta plan. I knew it was all a fantasy that she and I could run off together. Pure Alice in Wonderland kinda shit.
“She didn’t even know I existed, even though I’d said ‘hi’ to her twice, and had asked her how her day was once in two years.”
So this whole mess had started over a woman. I looked at Marie and realized that, without reservation, I’d do the same for her. So what Noble described wasn’t that far of a stretch, not really.
Noble’s expression shifted to a huge smile. “At least I didn’t think she knew I existed. Papa watched her close, like some kinda national treasure. But I was patient and bided my time. Papa Dee slipped up and let his guard down, and I was right there when he did. Me and Sasha, we got together one night … ah, yeah, I’ll skip that part ta save ya all the embarrassing details. Anyway, we hit it off. I mean we really hit it off. Fell in love, the both of us.”
“That wasn’t too smart,” I said. “Not with Papa Dee’s girl.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, big brother. We were damn careful about it. And we knew, we sure did, that it was just a matter of time, Papa Dee would figure us out. Especially with Del all up in my ass all the time, afraid I was movin’ in on him, tryin’ ta get his job. I wasn’t though, I was jus’ trying to get close to my girl. That’s all.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Papa liked me. He had this big deal goin’ down, this huge deal, and he asked me to run security on it.”
The night I’d arrested Noble, when he came over the counter at me and I pistol-whipped him all those years ago, he’d said that Del had accused him of a rip-off.
“You took off the load, didn’t you?” I said.
He stared at me for a long, fat moment. He shook his head. “I wanted to. I did. I planned it all out. I’ll admit to that. But I didn’t. I felt bad, Bruno. I didn’t want to sell all that rock to those kids, to those street whores ruinin’ their lives, to Joe College comin’ into the ghetto to cop some dope. I felt bad, I’m tellin’ ya. So I thought I could kinda make up for it by takin’ off this load.”
I shook my head. “Bullshit, brother. Call it like it was. You wanted out and you needed a stake to get it done. How could you save the people if you had to sell the load to get your stake? You’d be putting it right back out on the street.”
“Don’t you judge me, asshole. You shot Derek Sams.” He instantly shifted emotions and started to run up that uncontrolled rage again, his face bloated, the veins in his forehead pulsing. He caught himself this time.
I had shot and killed my son-in-law, Derek Sams, but only after he’d killed Albert, my grandson, and only after Sams got spit out the other end of the justice system, walked away clean. I couldn’t let that happen and I didn’t. As much as Noble wanted it to be the same, it wasn’t. “How much did you walk away with?” I fought down my anger. This whole fiasco hadn’t ignited over a woman. Maybe it started with that, but in reality, it came down to a twenty-five-year-old dope rip-off. Marie and I had come all this way over dope?
He glared at me.
“Well,” I said, “how much?”
“Four hundred and fifty kilos. But it didn’t go down. I’m tellin’ yeah, Bruno, it didn’t go down.”
“A half ton? You’re kiddin’ me, right?”
“Exactly, that’s a lot, right? I didn’t do it.”
I pointed my finger at his face. “Noble, don’t you dare lie to me. You lie to me, we’re outta here.”
Then it hit me. I said, “Wait. Wait. Papa Dee found out about you, didn’t he? That’s how Sasha got beat. Papa Dee found out about you two and took it out on her.”
His expression drooped, shifted from anger to sorrow. He looked away. His voice cracked. “She got hurt because of me. I’ll never forgive myself for it. Papa did find out. So naturally he took me off the deal. Hell, he tried to take me off the board. He sicced Del on my ass. He put up a contract, a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on my head, to get every swingin’ dick, poo-butt crack-head on the street to stick a shiv in me or bust a cap in my ass.”
“So why did you get a job at that Stop and Go?”
“Exactly, if I took off a half ton of coke, why would I be workin’ as a clerk in a damn corner grocery, huh? Tell me that, huh? I worked there ’cause I’d hit rock bottom. I got a straight job to earn some money, to do it the right way, to show Sasha I could do it. It was the only damn job I could get. And I needed that job. I needed to prove to her I could make it work.”
“No, you’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would you get the job if you had nine million dollars in coke?”
Marie cut in. “Nine million dollars? Nine million?”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s a lot of motivation.”
“So let me get this straight,” Marie said. “The reason we’re here is because someone is menacing your family over some cocaine they think you stole twenty-five years ago?”
“That’s right. My son and his two kids, Ricardo and Rebecca.”
“Someone thinks you have all of that coke,” I said. “A half ton of it stashed away somewhere for twenty-five years and no one’s ever found it. That doesn’t make any sense. Why now? What’s changed?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? The story’s been goin’ around the prison system for years. They’re callin’ it Noble’s white gold. Talkin’ about it like it’s some kind of pirate’s treasure.”
I smiled. “And I bet you haven’t done anything to discourage it either, have you? Why would you? If people thought you had that kind of secret, killin’ you off wouldn’t do them any good.”
That explained why he’d survived so long in the prison system that should’ve eaten him.
“Now they’ve gone after my family,” he said. “Last night I called home. My son said they grabbed Becca and Ricky yesterday. Went right into the school to show they don’t give one shit about the authorities and took ’em right out of their classes.”
Marie jumped up. “They kidnapped the kids? Who did this? Who?”
“I don’t know who, but my son said they snatched them right outta their preschool.”
My s
tomach turned sick. These children were family. Using children as pawns, a negotiating tool, made my blood boil. Didn’t they know what it did to the children? “Why didn’t you say something when we first walked in?”
“I didn’t wanna scare you off. I was at my wits’ end last night. I didn’t know if you’d come back. Not until I got the call on the PA from the booth bitch that there was a visit. That’s when I knew you’d come back. That was the longest night of my sorry-assed life, Bruno. You’re my last hope, and I didn’t wanna scare you off, so I didn’t tell you right out the gate. I wanted to explain the whole thing first. Believe me, I’m all tore up inside. You gotta help me, please. I’m beggin’ ya, man.”
“What do they want?” Marie asked. “Is it really all about this mysterious load of coke you have stashed?”
“I don’t have any coke stashed. You gotta believe me. That’s ridiculous. Where could you hide a half ton all these years and not have someone find it, huh? These guys are crazy, completely off their nut, ta even think it.”
“You’re sure it’s about this coke, then?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure, what else could it be? But they haven’t contacted my son yet. So I don’t know for absolute sure.”
“Your son has to call the police.” Marie said it more like a demand.
He finally broke eye contact with me and looked at my wife. “He called the police. My son called the police for sure. The police are in it now.”
“Shit.”
“Bruno, watch your mouth, please.”
I didn’t have time for her language scolding. “Noble, with the cops involved, you have to know it’s difficult for us to get mixed up in this.”
His face flushed and the veins in his temples pulsated. “Brother, I knew if it got a little rough, you’d turn tail and run. I was so careful, being so nice, and it didn’t matter a damn, did it? You’re still jus’ gonna turn tail and run, pissin’ in your pants at the first mention of the pol-eese. What happened to Bruno The Bad Boy Johnson, huh? What happened to that guy?”
Marie said, “Shut up. No one’s going to run.”
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