The Fury hp-4

by Jason Pinter

  JO: But surely you don't work for yourself. There are other people higher than you, I guess you might call them the board or something along those lines.

  BW: Always report to the crew leader (Note: Wil lingham refused to identify his crew leader's name, but it was confirmed by several subjects to be a man named Marvin Barnett, age thirty-one), and I know he don't take home every penny that come into his hand.

  JO: So where does the rest go?

  BW: I don't know that. Don't know about no

  "board" neither. Heard rumors about one dude who runs the whole show, but not like anyone's ever seen him, so it's probably bullshit.

  JO: So where do you see yourself in five years?

  The main man?

  BW: Hell no, man. The main man got too many problems. There's a reason it's called the crown of thorns. You only sit at the top for so long be fore someone decides he don't like your way of doing business. Guys in my spot, as long as we keep our head down and keep selling, we be all right. Might not make as much money as the big man, but I'll be alive a lot longer.

  I read the interview again. It wasn't much, but even then Willingham seemed to think there was some higher power, some authority figure running the show. The strange thing is that Butch seemed adamant about not doing drugs, about respecting the hierarchy of which he was a part. I wondered if there was a chance Willingham was killed over the book, but the book came out long after Butch was killed.

  In addition, most of the numerous references to dealers were protected by fake names, monikers used to protect them in case their employers sought retribu tion along the lines that Butch had received. From

  Jack's perspective, he probably figured he didn't need to protect Butch Willingham's name since the man was already dead.

  I found it to be a little too much of a coincidence that just weeks after this interview, the man was found dead with the words The Fury scrawled in his own blood. It didn't seem like Butch would have overstepped his bounds, but I couldn't be sure. Dealing wasn't exactly the most legitimate enterprise, so it was entirely possible he was blowing smoke up Jack's ass just to make himself sound like a good soldier.

  Regardless, something had happened in those weeks between the interview and Butch's death. He'd done or seen something that required him being "made gone."

  Looking back through the interview, I noticed this line of questioning:

  JO: How do you come to grips knowing that the product you sell will be used by children?

  BW: That ain't on me. I got a son, and I raise that boy right. Clarence gonna be fifteen next month.

  He knows if I ever see him lift a pipe or a needle, he's gonna feel a pain a lot worse than what those drugs can do to him. Grown-ups make their own decisions. I ain't got no sympathy for a grown man who uses. But a child, that's on the parent.

  If you can't raise your boy or girl right, and they end up sucking on a pipe, well, then, that's on the parents. There's a manhole in my street. City ain't never bothered to fix it. But I know it's there and step around that sucker. Someone else falls in? It's their own damn fault for being stupid.

  Butch Willingham had a son. Clarence. It was a long shot, but there was a chance.

  Using my cell phone, I went to 411. com and plugged in the name Clarence Willingham. Two matches came back; one living in Crown Heights, the other by Mor ningside Park on 107th Street.

  I called the first number. A man picked up.

  "Yeah?"

  "Hi…is this Clarence Willingham?"

  "Um, no," the man said, sounding irritated. "This was Clarence Willingham."

  "Excuse me?"

  "My name is Clarence Savoy now. Just got married last month."

  "You…married…oh, I get it. Was your father Butch

  Willingham?"

  "Butch?" the man said with a high-pitched laugh.

  "Try Albert. But close." Then Clarence Savoy hung up.

  I tried the second number. It rang half a dozen times but didn't go to voice mail. I let it keep ringing. After three more rings, a man picked up. He sounded tired, like I'd just woken him from a nap.

  "Who's this?"

  "Is this Clarence Willingham?"

  "Yeah, who's this?"

  "Clarence, was your father named Butch?"

  "Yeah, the hell's this about?"

  "My name is Henry Parker. I'm a reporter. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions."

  I told Clarence about his father and Jack's book. I needed to know if he knew anything else about his father's murder or business practices. Clarence was eight years old when his father died. There's a chance he remembered something.

  "I don't talk about this stuff over the phone,"

  Clarence said.

  "Well, my story is running tomorrow," I lied. "If you see me in person, we can talk about you giving me in formation as an unnamed source. If you don't cooper ate, I can't promise anything."

  I heard a rustling noise in the background. Then a female voice said, "Who is it?"

  I must have interrupted Clarence. Too bad for him.

  He shushed whoever was there and said, "Listen, man, I'll tell you whatever I know about my dad, but this is opening some seriously old wounds."

  "Great. I'll be there in half an hour. What's your address?"

  He gave me his address, which I jotted down before hanging up.

  I checked my watch. It was almost noon. I stopped at a Staples store and bought a new tape recorder, some pens and paper. These were the tools I brought along when conducting interviews, when talking to sources.

  I hadn't used them much recently because this investi gation had been more personal than professional. I thought everything revolved around my father's arrest.

  Only now could I see how wrong I'd been.

  28

  I kissed Amanda goodbye, made sure I was presentable and headed uptown to meet Clarence Willingham.

  I rode the 2 train to 116th and Lenox Avenue. It was a hot day outside, the breeze that had felt so cool on our balcony gone.

  Morningside Park was actually part of a cliff that sep arated Manhattan from Morningside Heights. It was also the location of a massive protest in 1968, when students of Columbia University staged a sit-in in and around the proposed construction of a gymnasium on the park grounds. With separate east and west entrances, many assumed this was to segregate the gym between black and white. University spokesmen denied the claims, but abandoned the plans after students barri caded themselves inside numerous university buildings.

  After a group of students opposed to the protests blockaded the occupied buildings, police came in to end the struggle. Over one hundred and fifty students were injured during the forced removal, and over seven hundred were arrested. Because of the terrible public re lations, specifically stemming from the student-on student violence, Columbia scrapped its plans and built an underground gym instead. Ironically the blueprints for the gym were then sold to Princeton University, which appropriated them for their own use.

  The address Clarence gave me was for a five-story brownstone within walking distance of the park. A pretty nice neighborhood. The Columbia campus stood directly on the opposite side of Morningside Park, and though Clarence did live far from student housing, the university owned such huge swaths of real estate in upper Manhattan that the neighboring streets were clean and graffiti free, devoid of clutter and garbage. It must have looked great in a brochure.

  Before turning onto Clarence's block, I called

  Amanda's cell phone. She picked up, answering with a hard-to-distinguish, "Heh-wo?"

  "Amanda?" I said. "Everything okay?"

  "Eating," she said, removing whatever had been in her mouth. "Chocolate-covered strawberry. I swear, we need to move in here."

  "Where did you buy that?"

  "I didn't buy it. They were in a small tin by the tele vision. I think they're complimentary."

  "Amanda," I said, shaking my head, "nothing in hotels is complimentary. Check the box."


  "Hold on." I heard her ruffling with something, then whisper oh hell under her breath.

  "What happened?"

  "Um…you know that bonus I got for Christmas?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, it's going to have to go toward paying off these strawberries."

  "It's okay," I said. "Just enjoy them. Watch some thing crappy on television, I'll be back later."

  "Okay, fine, I'll finish them. Be careful, babe. See you soon. Love you."

  "I love you, too."

  When I arrived at Clarence's building I rang the buzzer. I expected him to simply unlock the door, but within a minute I saw a man coming down the stairs toward me. He was wearing a bathrobe, loosely tied, with white briefs and blue slippers. A paunchy stomach hung over the elastic band of the briefs. It was a comical look, and it was safe to say he was coming to greet me rather than go for a stroll.

  He opened the door, and I extended my hand.

  "Henry Parker, nice to meet you, Clar…"

  Clarence was ignoring me. My hand sat there unshook, a lonely hitchhiker. Clarence wasn't even looking at me, he was too busy looking down the street, both sides, behind me, as though expecting a boogey man or a ninja to jump out and kill him. His eyes flick ered back and forth, widening and then closing. He squeezed them shut hard, then opened them again.

  Perhaps this allowed him to see better, or give him some extrasensory perception.

  When he seemed content that nobody was waiting to jump out at him, he said, "You come alone?"

  "Of course I did."

  "You sure about that?"

  "Um…yeah. Pretty sure."

  "You a cop?"

  I snorted out a laugh. "Are you serious? I said I was a reporter."

  "Cops lie. I don't believe that BS about cops having to declare themselves. If someone's recording this, I'm calling entrapment on your ass."

  I turned out all my pockets. Showed him I was carrying nothing.

  His brow furrowed. "That's not an answer."

  "No. I'm not a cop, I'm a reporter." I showed him my business card.

  "What'choo got in there?" he said, pointing to my bag.

  "Tape recorder, notepad."

  "You can't bring that to my place."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Nobody records or writes down what I say. You can't deal with that, you can leave."

  I didn't have much choice, so I said, "What do you want me to do with my stuff then?"

  "Bernita down the hall will watch it."

  "Bernita?"

  "You can trust her. She got a plasma TV. Anytime you have something you need stored safely, Bernita's your woman."

  I wasn't quite sure how that was supposed to convince me to leave my equipment with her. I guess I didn't have much of a choice but to trust Clarence's sterling recommendation of Bernita's safe-deposit skills.

  "Okay, whatever you say."

  "All right. Come on."

  Clarence led me into the hallway, past a row of rusty mailboxes and up the first flight of stairs. The building smelled of mold, and the paint was chipping on the staircase railing. Clarence took a left and knocked on the first door. A scraggly woman wearing a pink bathrobe and smoking an unfiltered cigarette opened it.

  I wondered if this was actually some sort of spa.

  "Bernita," he said. "This is Henry. He's gonna be leaving his bag with you for a while."

  Bernita's apartment beyond her looked rather massive, with a hallway splintering off to several dif ferent rooms. The floors were scrubbed clean, and a single dining table sat in the middle, uncluttered with the exception of a pair of crystal candlesticks. It seemed like quite a lot of space. Bernita wasn't wearing a wedding ring. The fact that she had at least three or four rooms for what looked like herself made me all the more conscious of my own dwelling.

  "How long?" she said.

  Clarence looked at me. "How long you need?"

  "Hour. Two, tops."

  Clarence said, "Forty-five minutes."

  "Whatever," she replied. Then she looked at me, her upper lip curled back. "Henry. Ain't never met a young boy named Henry."

  Bernita closed the door before I could reply.

  With my belongings safely-hopefully-squared away, Clarence led me to the fourth floor. He lived in apartment 4J. When we got to the door, Clarence stuck his hand into his bathrobe pocket, pulling out a key ring with at least thirty keys on it. I marveled at the man's security methods. Then he went to work unlock ing the half a dozen dead bolts on his front door.

  Once Fort Knox was fully unlocked, he opened the door and beckoned me inside.

  For the life of me I couldn't figure out why he went to such ridiculous lengths, because Clarence's apart ment was an absolute pigsty.

  Garbage littered the floor like he was trying to save room in the city landfills. Empty Chinese food and pizza boxes were stacked in one corner. Beer cans were strewn about, creating an aluminum carpet. I could identify at least a half-dozen different brands, as well as a few bottles of various liquors: Jose Cuervo, Cour voiser, Hennessy. Clearly, Clarence Willingham was not picky when it came to his booze.

  "Take a seat," he said, gesturing to a beanbag chair crisscrossed by duct tape like a low-budget surgical patient. I sat down, immediately feeling the beans shifting under me. The last beanbag chair I'd sat in was during college, and I'm pretty sure a box of wine was involved. "Can I get you a drink? Beer? Soda?

  Absinthe?"

  I was tempted to ask for the absinthe out of curiosity, but decided I wasn't that thirsty. "Thanks, I had lunch before I came."

  "Suit yourself, man." Clarence reached under a desk and pulled out a small wooden box. He opened it, and took out what appeared to be a piece of rolling paper and a bag of pot. He looked as me, pleased. "This is some pure hydro. Fifty bucks a gram. You can snag an ounce in Washington Square Park for about six hundred.

  Sometimes you go up by the George Washington

  Bridge, around 179th Street, you find some real fiends who'll sell it for cheaper, but it won't be as good. And you'd be surprised at how many of the kids from

  Columbia deal right in Morningside Park."

  "Thanks for the info," I said, "but I gave up smoking in college. I eat enough Cheetos these days as it is."

  "Suit yourself, reporter man."

  Clarence sprinkled some of the weed onto the paper.

  Then he spent a minute picking through it, removing any clumps or twigs. Once the mixture was in a slight cone shape-wide to narrow-he began to roll. Clarence stared at the joint with an almost trancelike intensity. He began in the middle, using his thumbs to roll it evenly, gradu ally moving his fingers to the ends of the paper. Once it was a cylinder, he licked the top edge of the paper and folded it over. When that was completed, he took a small piece of thicker paper and rolled it tightly into a spiral.

  He inserted that into one end of the joint. Clarence twisted the end without the roach so nothing would fall out.

  Taking the joint between his thumb and index finger,

  Clarence held it to his lips, sparked a lighter and took a deep drag. He drew it deep into his lungs, his eyes closing as the end of the joint glowed. Finally he removed it from his lips and puffed out a dark cloud that hung over his room for a minute before disappearing.

  When all that was done, he opened his eyes, looked at me, held out the joint. "Best weed you'll smoke in this city."

  "No, thanks," I said. "I'm working."

  "Whatever. So you said you wanted to talk about my pops. What about him?"

  "Your dad was Butch Willingham."

  "S'right." Clarence took another drag. I noticed a small corner of his upper lip was turned up. Either he wasn't entirely fond of speaking about his father, or hadn't in a long time.

  "Was he a good father?"

  Clarence held out the joint. I don't think he meant it that way, but I saw that as somewhat of an answer.

  "No better or worse, s'pose."

  "How do you mean
that?"

  "I know a lot of kids my age who had more'n I did.

  Know a lot that had less. My dad, he didn't have much of an education. No college, no high school. Dropped out at fourteen, spent the rest of his life slinging rock.

  That's all the man knew. As far as I knew he was good at it."

  "How so?"

  "Kept me well fed. My moms died when I was a kid and I never had no brothers or sisters, so it was all up to him. He made sure I went to school, beat my ass if I didn't get good grades. I know a lot of dads who bought the rock my dad sold and just sunk into a hellhole because of it.

  My dad never smoked, never drank. To him this was his livelihood, like someone who goes to a plant, punches a clock. He didn't take his work home with him."

  "I find that a little hard to believe. I mean…" I motioned to the joint. Clarence laughed.

  "Yeah, I used to do harder stuff. Crack. A little heroin here and there. The weed's a cooling-down drug. I'll get off it at some point." He took another long, deep, drawnout puff, then smiled lazily. "Just not yet."

  "The sins of the father," I said under my breath.

  "What's that?"

  "Nothing. So do you remember when your father was killed?"

  "Remember?" Clarence said, coughing into his fist.

  "I was the one that found him."

  "You're kidding," I said.

  "Nope. Thursday nights I had me a pickup game of basketball in the park with some other kids. I was about six-two by high school, and could handle it like a dream.

  I thought if I kept growing I could be another Magic

  Johnson, the kind of big guy who had the skills of a point guard. Then one Thursday I came home. Picked up one of those ice-cream cones in a wrapper, you know with chocolate around the cone and nuts in the vanilla?

  Carried it home with me, went upstairs, first thing I see is blood on the carpet. I couldn't see my dad, that's how big the puddle was. He was lying in the living room, the puddle had spread into the hallway. I go in there, and he's facedown, arms above his head like he was trying to fly and fell from the sky."

  "You saw the words?" I said.

  "Yeah. Just barely, but they were in the carpet. Lucky for us we had an off-white carpet, otherwise I might have missed it. The Fury. That's what my dad wrote while he was dying on our floor."