by Brad Parks
Famous was seated on the front steps of one of the town houses, leaning against the side railing. He was tall-probably two inches taller than Doc-and lean, with bones jutting out in more than a few places. He had skin like mahogany and eyes like a lizard, large and set wide apart. There was an attempt at a beard on his chin, though it was pretty scraggly, barely visible against his dark complexion. His arms were crossed.
And I got the feeling, right away, he was a bad dude.
He was the kid that, no matter where he grew up, would have ended up involved in some malevolent venture, taking other kids along with him. Stick him in Appalachia and he’d start a crystal meth lab. Stick him on Wall Street and he’d engage in insider trading. That’s why he freaked Ruthie out: Famous was pure evil.
Still, as Uncle Bernie so pertly pointed out, this wasn’t a quilting bee. And I wasn’t here to ask him for advice on sashing and backing.
“Hey, what’s up?” Ruthie asked Twan as he approached on the sidewalk.
“Who’s he?” Twan replied, appraising me with the appropriate level of suspicion that a teenaged city kid gives a well-dressed (albeit still in yesterday’s clothes) thirty-something-year-old white man.
“This is my boss. He’s the one who needs to approve that story about you guys,” Ruthie said. He could have thrown a wink in my direction, but he didn’t need to. I got it.
“Oh, mos’ def, mos’ def,” Twan said, breaking into a wide smile. I translated that to mean “most definitely.”
But I wasn’t going to make this all go so easily. I figured that since I had been put in the position of being The Man, I might as well play the part.
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Geoffrey,” I said. “We have policies and procedures that we must follow with the strictest adherence. As you know, all candidates for an Eagle-Examiner Good Neighbors profile must be carefully vetted to ensure they are of the highest character and moral fiber. The committee absolutely insists on it.”
There was no committee, of course. Just like there were no policies or procedures. But since I could tell Twan was only catching about half of the polysyllabic words I was using, I wasn’t too worried about being called on it. I only wished I had brought a clipboard along. A white man looks that much more convincing with a clipboard.
Ruthie picked up my pile of baloney and helped me make a sandwich out of it.
“That’s true,” he said. “I forgot about the committee.”
“There cannot be even a suggestion of turpitude.”
“Right.”
“I mean, remember what happened with the McNulty boy-very unfortunate.”
Twan was watching this go back and forth and finally cut in. “Whoa, whoa. We tol’ you about red dot. You ain’t flagin us now?”
I had no idea what “flagin” was-I guess the lack of understanding of each other’s vocabulary went both ways-but it sounded like something bad.
“There’s no flagin of any sort going on here. Nor will any flagin be tolerated in the future,” I assured him. “However, there are some minimum requirements that must be met. If we are to write about a rap group, it can’t just be some boys playing around. We only write about serious musicians with legitimate futures. Tell me about this rap group of yours.”
Twan launched into a long and animated description of their group-which they called Hevvy Soulz, because I guess spelling doesn’t count in the hip-hop world-and how someone’s cousin had gotten them some recording time in someone else’s cousin’s basement studio and how they had to lay it down across one of the standard prerecorded tracks, and even though it was one they never heard before, they somehow made it work.
Or at least that was my translation. I’m sure I missed some of the nuance and much of the subtlety. The only person who probably didn’t miss a word-of anything-was Famous, who was watching over Twan, Ruthie, and me, never uncrossing his arms.
“And you’ve got a demo CD? The committee will insist on hearing a demo,” I said, when Twan was done. I knew, from my previous encounters with a variety of aspiring rappers, they all had demo CDs, of which they were very proud and which they would supply to you whether you wanted them to or not. The backseat of my Malibu probably had three demo CDs in it, and that was just from the last two months. I had never listened to any of them, but somehow I was always reluctant to toss them until they had been there for a full season.
Twan ran to a knapsack and grabbed an unmarked CD in a clear jewel case, then handed it to me. I considered it as if my mind were a laser capable of reading the digital material recorded on it and making an instant determination as to its musical quality.
“Excellent,” I said. “This will help the committee greatly. Now there’s just one more thing.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ruthie said, as if he knew what I was about to say.
“What?” Twan said.
“All Good Neighbors candidates must demonstrate their moral fiber,” I said. “But I think I have an idea as to how you can do that to the committee’s satisfaction.”
Twan furtively glanced back at Famous, who registered no reaction that I could see, then returned his attention to me. “Yeah?”
“Well, as I understand it, you told Geoffrey about a group of policemen who are selling guns in this neighborhood?”
“Yeah. So?”
“A Good Neighbor is the kind of person who wouldn’t tolerate such behavior from a member of the law enforcement community,” I said. “To help us bring these rapscallions to justice, we need to observe you making a buy.”
* * *
Twan again checked in with the stoop. Famous remained impassive.
“How we gonna do that?” Twan asked.
“How does it usually work when you make a buy from them?”
“We just see them, you know, around and stuff. They doin’ they thing, we doin’ our thing. And then we just cool out.”
“I see,” I said, because that had made things so clear for me. “But what if you need a gun immediately?”
“Well, they got this number you call.”
“What kind of number?”
“I don’t know. You let it ring one or two times then you hang up. You don’t leave no message or nothing.”
“And then?”
“Someone calls you back.”
“Who?”
“It don’t matter.”
“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
“I’m sayin’, whether you talk to one man or the other, it don’t matter. They all the same.”
“How many guys do they have?” I asked, because I was still trying to figure out how extensive this network was. Did it just operate out of the Fourth Precinct? Did it have tendrils reaching out to other parts of the department?
“Don’t know.”
“But a lot of different guys might end up calling you back?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Well, you tell them where you doing your thing”-I didn’t need to ask what “thing” that was-“and then they come rolling up on you. If it was, you know, real police, we’d be gone before they even stop they car. But we know it’s them, so we do the, you know, the hands on the hood thing.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “They sell you a gun right out of their patrol car?”
Twan’s eyes darted quickly toward the still-statuesque Famous, whose inaction allowed Twan to continue.
“Naw, man, they do it in the car.”
“You actually get in the back of the car?”
“Yeah, man. Folks walking along see another nigga being shoved in the back of a car by the po-po, they ain’t looking twice. You feel me? So that’s where it go down.”
I immediately began thinking of the photographic possibilities of that: a kid in the back of a Newark Police car, buying a gun from a cop in a uniform. Brodie might need to be hospitalized for priapism if we got a photo like that.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket for a time check. It read 4:21. The su
n wouldn’t set until seven or so. If I asked them to set up a buy for six, that would give me enough time to get a photographer-maybe two-in place and hidden where the cops couldn’t see them, while still having enough natural light for the shooters to get decent art.
“Okay, then let’s set up a buy,” I said.
Twan was apparently primed to go-with Famous’s tacit permission-because he pulled out his own phone and was going to dial a number before I stopped him.
“Slow down, slow down,” I said. “Let’s talk about this for a second. I need a little time to set this up right so we can get pictures. We’ll want to hide some photographers somewhere around here, maybe even get video of this-it’d be great for the Web.”
As soon as I had said the word “pictures,” Famous uncrossed his arms and let them dangle at his sides. He might have even given his head a quarter shake. For him, this qualified as an outburst. And Twan heard it as clearly as if Famous had started screaming.
“What you mean, pictures?” Twan asked. “We ain’t doing no pictures.”
“Why not? What’s the difference?”
“We just … we, you know, we ain’t playin’ with that.”
Twan must have looked up in the direction of the stoop three times during his last sentence. Without Famous to tell him exactly why the pictures were objectionable, Twan was like an electric toy car whose remote control was busted: zooming around on the floor, crashing into random furniture, unsure of where to go.
Finally, Famous stood up-in a slow, unrushed manner that made it clear he wasn’t going to hurry on my account. His arms remained at his side as he deliberately descended down three steps. Once on the sidewalk, he put his hands in his pockets and walked toward me but never looked at me. His head kept swiveling left and right, his wide-set eyes seemingly taking in everything except that which was directly in front of him.
He kept getting closer-much closer than he needed to be-and still never acknowledged me. It was unnerving, but I suppose that was the point. It was a game. Did he intimidate me? Yeah, a little. Was I going to show it? Not a chance. To evince fear was to lose all respect. And I had been hanging around this world long enough to know that in the hood, respect was everything.
He finally stopped when his face was perhaps twenty inches away. He was half a head taller than me, so this put my eyes roughly at the level of his scraggly chin. His gaze was fixed on some point well behind me.
“What’s your deal, dawg?” he asked. His voice was raspy, almost like his vocal cords had been damaged in some way. Or like he smoked a lot of something without a filter.
I smiled. It was time to drop the Mr. White Committee Man act. Something told me it had never really worked on Famous anyway.
“Hell, Famous, I’m like you: just another hustler trying to make my way in this world,” I said. “My hustle just happens to be the newspaper.”
He nodded his head without moving it-I’m not quite sure how he did it, but I’d have to learn how someday. He still wasn’t looking at me.
“We do the buy, you pay for the gun?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“And we keep it?”
“I sure as hell don’t want it.”
This seemed to satisfy him. The pleasure was written all over his face-his cheeks actually raised one-tenth of a nanometer, which for him was like a full-blown grin.
“What you need these pictures for?” he asked
“I’m not making a collage for my scrapbook here, pal. They’d go in the newspaper. Probably big and flashy. Give your rap group a lot of publicity, that’s for sure.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would I have to testify?”
“I don’t have any control over that,” I said. “I do the newspaper part. The testifying part would be up to a prosecutor, assuming there were charges brought and it went to trial.”
“I ain’t testifying,” he said.
“You want to get rid of those red dot guys, this might be your only chance.”
He stood perfectly still. After ten, maybe fifteen seconds, one of his jaw muscles flexed.
“You can do your story without the pictures, though,” he said.
He had me there. “Yeah, that’s probably true. As long as we see the buy go down. It’s just better with the artwork.”
“Not my problem,” he said, pulling away. The movement was so abrupt, and it came after such an extended period of stillness that I nearly flinched.
He stopped in front of Twan and rasped, “We do the buy in an hour. Do it somewhere else, not here. And no pictures. We see any cameras, we off.”
With Doc in tow, Famous glided off, all those angles and dark skin disappearing around the corner with him. He never did look me in the eye.
* * *
Now that the boss had spoken, it was left to Twan, Ruthie, and me to work out the details. The first thing we had to decide was a location. I couldn’t fathom why Famous didn’t want it going down on his home turf, but I guess he had his reasons.
I knew it needed to be in the neighborhood-the cops would get suspicious if we asked them to do it downtown, outside the front doors of the Eagle-Examiner building-but Twan wasn’t offering any suggestions. The only thing I could think was that I wanted to be in a place where I could see but not be seen. Suddenly, my mind flashed up an image of the bodega in Uncle Bernie’s building, the place with the one-way glass.
It was within sight of the Fourth Precinct, so the cops would be comfortable doing it there. If I had Twan and his buddies make the buy on the corner in front of the bodega, it offered a perfect vantage point to watch the buy from up-close, far closer than we’d be able to get hiding in a tree or crouching in a parked car. And if we wanted to celebrate afterward by getting a good deal on Calphalon cookware, all we had to do was go around the corner. It would be perfect.
Twan made the call to the magic number, got the return call almost immediately, and then set the details. I was going to be funding the purchase of a brand-new.22 caliber Beretta for the low, low bargain price of five hundred dollars. The buy was set for five thirty.
Ruthie and I made a quick run to a local check-cashing place, where I wrote out a check for $508.75 that allowed me to receive $500 in cash. What a deal. Then we returned to the corner boys. Famous and Doc were still gone, but a couple of new guys had replaced them.
I handed Twan the cash, then talked over the plan one more time. We swapped cell phone numbers and agreed that I would call him when we were in place. If he answered the phone by saying his name, he was in a spot where he could talk. If he answered without saying his name, I was supposed to say I had the wrong number. Either way, the call meant he knew he was free to go ahead and make the buy.
We also agreed that, afterward, we would rendezvous back at their corner, so we could inspect the gun.
“So that went great,” I said, as we returned to Ruthie’s car. “It’s a shame about the no cameras thing. But it’s possible the pictures wouldn’t have shown anything anyway.”
“Yeah, and we could at least take cell phone photos, right? As long as they didn’t see us doing it.”
“Oh, yeah, good thought.” The kids and their technology. Low resolution cell phone photos through darkened windows wouldn’t do us much good in the paper-I can’t imagine they’d reproduce as anything more than indistinguishable ink smudges-but at least we’d have some hard evidence of the malfeasance taking place in our fair city.
“So,” Ruthie said, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter, “we’re going to tell Tina about this now, right?”
“What are you, nuts? Why would we want to do that?”
“Well, I mean, she is the manag-”
“Ruthie, you want to be doing Good Neighbors the rest of your life? This story could be a real game-changer for you.”
“I know, but what if-”
“Stop, stop, stop. Think about it. If you call Tina and tell her everything that’s going on, she
might just say good luck and Godspeed. Orrrr…”
I drew out the pause a little bit, then picked up: “She also might tell us to pull back, or, worse, she might call the lawyers-who can always invent ten reasons why you should stick to covering ladies auxiliary garden club meetings. Point is, I’d rather give her the chance to tell me everything I did wrong after the fact than give her the chance to micromanage it ahead of time. It’s best she not even know we’re together. Trust me, the less the editors know at this stage, the better.”
“Oh, o-okay,” he said. He regripped the steering wheel and swallowed.
“What?”
“I sort of … I sort of told her I was coming to pick you up.”
“Ruthie!” I said sharply. “I thought you learned your lesson from the toilet water testing incident.”
“I did, but … well, she’s been texting me every ten minutes asking me where I am … and she’s … I mean, she’s the managing editor for local news. I can’t just not text her back!”
“You sure can. As a matter of fact, I think this is a great time to practice.”
“But I-”
“End of discussion,” I said, grabbing the check-cashing receipt from where I had wedged it in his cup holder and stuffing it in my pocket. It was probably as close to documentation as I would get for this little caper. I needed to be able to expense this somehow, and I didn’t think the cops were in the business of giving itemized receipts.
But the more I thought about it, they sure seemed to have the rest of the business thing down. Cops selling arrest-proof guns to thugs. From a purely economic standpoint, it was genius. Who knew the clientele-the thug marketplace, as it were-better than the cops? They had an entire police department’s worth of intelligence on their potential customers. And from a certain point of view, they didn’t even need it: they had been doing market research from the moment they arrived on the force.
They obviously had a good handle on the supply. I didn’t know how they were getting their new guns-I would guess it was either from gun shows, which were pitifully unregulated, or from out-of-state straw buyers-but they had plentiful access to used guns. They could simply take them off other thugs or dip into the nearly endless supply of confiscated guns anytime they got low. They could even drive up demand for their product by making busts on the competitors. It was all pretty slick-until Kipps came along and somehow threatened to ruin it.