Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “This is a bad area, Marlene,” observed Poco. “You see those guys aroun’ there? They dealin’ drugs.”

  “No kidding?” said Marlene. “Good thing I’m not on duty or I’d have to lodge a criminal complaint. OK, Booger, we get out here.”

  On the street, she leaned in the window and said, “Poco, stick around the neighborhood, OK? It’ll be two, three hours max. Say forty on top of the regular hire.”

  “Thass cool, guira. I’ll be aroun’.”

  The Dodge drew away, and Marlene walked up to the closest vendor, a short yellow man wearing four sweatshirts in layers, who immediately hit his pitch. “Whachoo, whachoo, I gottit, skag, ludes, reds, I got crank, I got flake …” Then he saw her companion. “What the fuck is that!”

  “He’s my cousin Lewis from Westchester,” said Marlene demurely. “I’m showing him the sights. He’d like to see Lamont,” said Marlene.

  “Lamont? I dunno no Lamont.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Marlene. She leaned closer and said confidentially, “Honestly, Lewis has been looking forward to this for weeks. You definitely don’t want me to have to tell him you’re not being helpful. He has a real problem controlling his temper when he’s disappointed.”

  “Bitch, listen close, I don’ fucking know any damn Lamont—” the man began, and at that moment a tall teenager darted forward from the drift of men and grabbed Marlene’s shoulder bag.

  She pulled back instinctively on the strap and was yanked off her feet, crashing into the stinking canvas of her companion’s chest. The Booger instantly whipped a huge arm around her, holding her a few inches off the ground against his left side. With his right hand he grabbed the strap of the bag and stopped the kid dead in his tracks.

  The kid’s eyes widened and he pulled out a six-inch gravity knife. With a curse he lunged forward and sank the knife into the Booger’s wide belly.

  The Booger roared, “Nnngah nunka orgh!” and, releasing the bag strap, seized the wrist of the purse snatcher’s knife hand. The kid tried to jerk back, to no avail, and then kicked his captor twice in where his groin might have been expected to be. For all the effect it had, though, he might as well have been kicking a utility pole.

  The Booger placed Marlene gently back on her feet. Then he reached out, grabbed the kid’s forearm with his other hand and with one violent twisting motion snapped both bones. The kid let out a single shriek and collapsed onto the pavement.

  This whole sequence of events had taken not twenty seconds, and the sweatshirt man Marlene had first addressed was still standing there as if fastened to the pavement, his jaw gaping. Two gold teeth glinted in the dull afternoon light.

  Marlene smiled tightly at the man, and then, taking a deep breath through clenched jaws, tugged at the knife sticking from the Booger’s chest. It came free with a soft crunch. She examined the blade briefly; it was not clean, but it was not bloody either. She dropped it into the Booger’s mail bag.

  She looked the man in the eye. “Lamont?” she said.

  “By the b-barrel,” the man stammered. “Yellow cowboy boots and the long suede coat.”

  “Thank you. Come on along, cousin Lewis.”

  Lamont had observed the events on the sidewalk, as had his peer group. A path magically cleared before Marlene.

  “Bello sent me,” she said to Lamont. “I want to see Doone.”

  “Bello din say not’ing about dat one. Joncrow, ’im a go dead me I bring dis bwai up ’im ranch deh.”

  “He’ll stay in the street,” said Marlene reassuringly.

  Lamont licked his lips nervously but nodded. “Follow me, den.”

  He led them down Ralph Avenue across the streets named for Revolutionary heroes, toward Crown Heights. In Marlene’s girlhood this had been a respectable, even an elegant neighborhood. The housing stock, large brownstones set back from the street and ringed with low stone or cast-iron fencing, had been cut up into rooms by slum lords who had purchased them from the retreating bourgeoisie. They were tatty now, painted with graffiti and with their little front yards choked in trash. But some of the streets were still reasonably pleasant, tree-lined with old sycamores and inhabited by people among whom hope had not entirely died.

  Lamont turned down one of these streets and stopped before a large house faced with reddish rusticated stone. He opened the waist-high iron gate and said, “Wait ’im here. You come wit’ me.”

  Marlene said, “Booger, wait here. If I’m not out by dark, come in.” The big man grunted assent and began to root through a sidewalk pile of trash.

  She followed Lamont down the path. They climbed the broad marble steps. The house still had its heavy glass and wrought-iron doors. Lamont rang the bell. After waiting several minutes, he rattled the bars, calling out, “Yo, Coolie! Open de raas door dem!”

  More minutes passed and then the door locks clicked and it swung back revealing a barrel-chested yellow-skinned black man with an oriental cast to his features, wearing dreadlocks and a red, green and black wool tam on his head.

  “Is what fe you bangin’ den, Lamont?” he asked.

  “I brung de Babylon woman Joncro want fe see.”

  Coolie looked Marlene up and down and then stepped out of the doorway. Marlene crossed the threshold and was led through another glass and iron door into a dark and different world.

  As she stepped past the inner door, she was struck, to her great surprise, with a sense memory from her childhood. Her grandmother had had a sister, Tanta Nina, who seemed to the six-year-old Marlene impossibly ancient, a contemporary of the saints on the holy cards she won in school. This old Sicilian woman, dragged reluctantly to New York in late widowhood by her American family, had taken one look at the New World and rejected it. She had created in her tiny Canarsie apartment a reproduction of her life in Palazzolo.

  Entering her apartment hallway was like entering another world; even the air was different, alien, laden with exotic odors—steam heat, rotting paint, anisette, singed feathers, vinegar, garlic, camphor. All the kids, Marlene and her contemporaries, had hated to be brought there for holiday visits. It wasn’t the frail, toothless old lady in rustling black that was frightening; it was the air itself. The air made you believe that the rest of the world might have vanished, that the only reality left was these cramped and overheated rooms, densely impregnated with the foreign, and filled with the hollow scratchy sound of old records in Italian, played on a huge mahogany wind-up phonograph.

  John Doone’s house had the same sort of air: tropical in temperature, laden with exotic aromas, conjuring up not rural Sicily but West Kingston, Trenchtown, and the jungly villages of the cockpit country—cooking rice, curry, hot grease, goat meat, the heavy stench of white rum, a sweet, cloying perfume Marlene could not identify, and (overlying all) the fug of marijuana.

  And there was the music too. A rhythmic thump permeated the house, a sound felt through the feet and belly as much as the ears. Someone was playing reggae over a set of very serious speakers.

  She was led up a dark stairway, down a darker hall, into a brightly lit room. Three dark women, their heads wrapped with bright scarves, were doing something at a table. Brown children played on the floor or ran in circles. The music was louder here and she could hear the scratchy singing, and the bass guitar, although the words were unclear. The beat was clear enough—deh deh Dum de DAAH, de de Dum de DAAH—the women were working their shoulders to it as Marlene passed them. They didn’t look up from what they were doing.

  They went through another door into a much larger room, high-ceilinged and shadowy, thickly carpeted, with an ornate fireplace. Here they stopped. Marlene’s eye took a moment to adjust to the relative dimness; the room seemed inordinately crowded with furniture, like a Levitz showroom: several sofas, stuffed armchairs in numbers, coffee tables in marble and wood, leather recliners, table and standard lamps. There was no pattern or design to the arrangement; the stuff had just been shoved where it would fit.

  There were also people in
the room, perhaps twenty-odd, men and women and some children, as if a party were in progress. They were well dressed, in the player style. The men favored leisure suits or bush-jacket outfits in pale pastels or white over open silk print shirts. They wore knitted tams or floppy caps. The women were in bright print dresses, and some had their heads wrapped in scarves, as in tourist posters of Jamaica.

  But the atmosphere was not party-like, despite the heavy smell of marijuana and white rum, and the penetrating bump of the reggae. People were speaking in lowered voices, with the occasional louder expostulation of argument. Once again the scene plucked at Marlene’s memory, but from a different era of her life: this wasn’t a party or a family gathering. It was court.

  “Wait, you!” said her burly guide, and he moved away toward the far end of the room, under the large, curtained windows, where the crowd was thicker. Shortly he re-emerged and gestured to Marlene. The people made way for her and she found herself standing before a broad mahogany table, on which sat a desk lamp, several account ledgers, an ashtray holding a smoldering cigar-sized, newspaper-wrapped reefer, a bottle of white rum with no label, two glass tumblers, and a large nickel-plated .38 revolver with engraved pearl grips. Behind the table was John Doone.

  He was a black man—that is, his skin was not one of the infinite shades of brown called “black” by Americans but literally black, the matte, light-absorbent color of soot or of a CIA spy plane. His hair was cropped short and his skin had the fine, slightly oily texture of well-worn leather. There was a deep scar on his cheek that glinted blue highlights when he moved. The nose was thin and hooked, and the mouth was deep-lipped, wide and tightly held.

  Doone’s eyes were a surprising golden-brown color, particularly striking in their matte setting, like topaz inlaid in ebony. These regarded Marlene coldly. Without preamble he said, “Woman, they tell me you know who make me lose my property.”

  Marlene coolly returned his gaze. She said, “I’d like a chair.”

  Conversation halted in the room. Then there were surprised murmurs. Doone opened his mouth as if to issue a retort, then gestured to one of his satraps. An armchair was thrust forward and Marlene sat.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m here to propose a deal, Mr. Doone. As you say, I have some information you want. You have something I want. We can both benefit—”

  “Doone ’im make no deal with Babylon, yaah,” Doone interrupted. His finger slowly reached out and played with the barrel of the revolver on the desk, rocking and spinning it on its balance point. He gave it a last casual flick and the barrel ended up pointed straight at Marlene.

  She ignored this demonstration. She said, “I’m not from Babylon. I’m from Ozone Park. Babylon is way out on the Island.”

  Doone frowned, his brow knitting itself into a mass of thick channels like a truck-tire tread. From his crowd, murmurs.

  “It was a joke,” said Marlene. The frown deepened. This was not a great start. She drew a deep breath and tried to recoup. “Look, Mr. Doone. I have no bone to pick with you. Trust me on this. I don’t care what you do for a living. I work in Manhattan, not Brooklyn. I came here because I want to talk to Leona Simmons, that’s all.”

  He glared at her for a long moment. Then he said, “You got somet’ing you gone a tell me, tell! If not, get de fuck outa me house!”

  “That’s really nice, Mr. Doone. You ought to talk to the guy who writes the ads for Jamaica. I thought it was supposed to be the friendly island.”

  There was a mass intake of breath and all talk ceased. Marlene gathered that this was not the way John Doone was ordinarily addressed in his inner sanctum. She thought she saw a smile play around Doone’s lips, which may or may not have been a good sign. He said, “Daughter, listen me! You playin’ wit fire you don’ understand, yaah. You t’ink, cas you white gal from big Babylon office, nothin’ can happen a you here. It not so, gal. Coo yaah! Dis house, I make de law. I say you go out, so you do; I say no, you disappear, nuh?”

  Marlene nodded impatiently. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You cut up people and throw them in the trash. OK, you’re terrifying me. I tell you what, though.” She wagged her left hand in his face, so he could see where the two smallest fingers were partially missing. “I’m already started, see.” She tapped her false eyeball with her fingernail. It made an audible click. “This too. You want to pay somebody to cut me up, I wouldn’t want you to get ripped off. I mean, you could probably get a discount.”

  Another moment of stunned silence, and then John Doone’s face split apart to show a set of large teeth, impossibly white against his skin, a dental strobe out of the blackness, and he laughed long and hard. Everyone else in the room suddenly thought it was pretty funny too. When the noise died away, John Doone said, “What you name, daughter?”

  “My name’s Marlene,” she said. “Why do they call you Joncrow?”

  “Cho, gal, where you heard dat?” He laughed again, then followed it with a rapid-fire exchange of patois, unintelligible to Marlene, with the nearest of his companions, producing more laughter. Marlene didn’t know whether this changed mood was a good or bad sign. Maybe these people got happy before they killed you.

  Doone said, “Some o’ dem say, dem call me Joncrow, cas I black like de joncrow, wha’ unu call de buzzard in Jamaica, nuh? An’ another reason, dem say, cas, dem say in Jamaica, ‘How fas ’im run, de joncrow beat ’im, how strong ’im be, de joncrow eat ’im.’ You understan’?”

  “Yes, it means death comes to all and the buzzards feed on it. I like the second reason.”

  This seemed to please Doone. He smiled at her and said, “Cho, you right, gal, to raas!” He leaned back in his chair. “So now we mo’ friendly, nuh. You a tell me what you want.”

  She glanced around the room. “I’d like to speak with you alone.”

  A momentary frown crossed Doone’s face, but it passed, and he made a swift dismissing gesture, followed by a rustling, chair-shoving exeunt all. In thirty seconds they were alone in the room with the reggae. Marlene played her ace.

  “OK, look, the big question in the Simmons murder is the dope stashed in the glove of his car. At first we thought it was a plant, to throw the cops off the trail, and take some of the pressure off the case. A sports hero who’s also a dope dealer—people don’t want to know about it. The problem with that is that nobody will associate Simmons with dope. He was pretty clean as far as his teammates can tell.”

  Unless they’re lying, thought Marlene, but plunged on. “But that leaves us with another problem—who’d want to kill Simmons bad enough to ditch fifty grand worth of good cocaine as a scam? It was worth at least that, wasn’t it?”

  Doone shrugged. “Say it so. Den what?”

  “So rethink it. What if the target wasn’t Marion at all. What if the target was you? Leona worked for you. She used Marion’s car all the time. Maybe they figured Marion was in with her. Anyway, Marion’s sitting in the car somewhere, and somebody who doesn’t like you figures he’ll leave you a message. Bang bang.”

  Of course, they knew Simmons had not been shot while sitting in the car, only finished off there, but there was no need to let Doone in on that bit of information.

  Doone said, “Cho, you doan tell me nuttin I doan know already. But is you can name names?”

  “You’ll never know unless you let me talk to Leona,” answered Marlene.

  Doone leaned forward menacingly and pointed his finger at Marlene. “To raas! Gal, you a go make me rahtid wi’ you. Coo yah, I talk a dat gal a’ready. She doan know raas ’bout who dead her brudder. Dis I know, nuh.”

  “I still want to talk to her.”

  “Yah, unu want fe put her in de jail. What, you t’ink you playin’ wit’ some quashie, nuh? You t’ink I doan know de D.A. got her, ’im reduce de charge, ’im want her fe spy on me? An’ now you come, you t’ink you trick me wi’ dis talk ‘bout you know dis, you know dat. What I t’ink? You doan know shit.”

  “You can think what you want,” said Marlene
calmly. “But whoever hit Simmons isn’t going to stop there. I would think you couldn’t afford to turn down anything that would let you find them before they find you. And another thing: if the D.A.’s got his eye on you already, maybe he likes you for the Simmons murder.”

  Doone laughed. “If ’im t’ink so, ’im dam’ fool. On de night dat bwai ’im shot, I in de jail, nuh, in de City.”

  Marlene, nonplussed, continued, “Good for you, then. I, on the other hand, have no beef with you at all. I doubt you had anything to do with Simmons’s death. I think that, between the two of us, we can figure out who did. But you have to trust me. Let me see Leona.”

  He scowled and pointed his finger again. “Huh! Trust you? To raas, trust you! You mus be t’ink me stupid bungo, nuh. What reason me got fe trust you, Babylon? You not oppress me? You not cheat me? You not hunt me like de beast? Now, so little white-white gal, come a me, tell a me dis yah sweet tale, trust me, Ah doan do no harm a John Doone, jus lemme see de girl. Shit! You know wha it take fe me a trust you? Black you skin and live in dat Trenchtown fe twenty year, nuh! Den we see. Now, you go home little white gal, go have dat white baby fi you. You damn lucky you funny you, dis time. Anudder time, I a go show you somet’ing you doan like.” Doone swiveled his chair around so his back was to her. She was dismissed. She heard a door open, and a large man stuck his head in and glared at her.

  She had seconds before the crowd returned and hustled her out. A phrase popped into her head and she spoke it, almost without volition, pitching her voice to carry. “You’ll trust me because I’m not afraid of death.”

  The chair swiveled around. Doone looked at her oddly. “Is wha’ you talkin’, gal?”