Homeboy

by Seth Morgan

  Then he was derricked up from behind and wrenched around by his cuffs to face a narrow dark man in a narrow dark suit with a narrow black Hav-A-Tampa Jewel aimed through Joe’s heart like a stake.

  “Lieutenant Tarzon,” twitched the seegar. “Homicide.”

  “Huh?” The Strip spun slowly, an outsize neon roulette wheel.

  “You’re under arrest on suspicion of felony murder.”

  “Oh,” Joe mumbled as if someone had told him his fly was unzipped.

  BLACK MAN’S BURDEN

  Ducklike the bluntnosed ferry breasted the choppy bay confettied with the sails of Sunday mariners. High in a blue sky scrubbed sparkling clean overnight by north Pacific winds hung a single highprowed cloud, serene and magisterial as God’s own hairpiece.

  The ferry’s main contingent, a battalion of krauts, scrambled around the deck, exclaiming and snapping one another’s photos against a backdrop equally spectacular in its entire ambit. Children shouted and scampered underfoot, interlocked lovers leaned over the rail, watching the foaming wake; elderly couples in lounge chairs against the sundrenched deckhouse held hands, eyes closed, transported by the brisk salt air and throbbing diesels.

  But one blot marred this maritime idyll, a giant bald blot suited in black with wraparound blackglasses screening eyes to which sunlight was anathema. For Baby Jewels hated the outdoors more than the national anthem, fresh air worse than renegade whores, and bay excursions with the same venom apportioned waiters who introduced themselves by their first names. His time was afterhours, his action peddling hot celluloid and cold women, his passion pawnbrokering dreams, his spiritual home the neon strip of the soul. Baby Jewels would sooner coach Little League than ride the Sausalito ferry. It was Gloria’s sugardaddy who insisted on meeting with the repository of his darkest, most lonely secret in the lightest, most populous of places—on a Sunday, when no local commuters would be aboard to recognize him.

  But after today, Baby Jewels consoled himself, I call the shots; keeping an eye on a large seagull hovering menacingly off the stern as if about to make a bomb run, telling himself again: After today we’ll meet at homeplate at Candlestick Park if I want. Or in any public toilet stall.

  A small boy stood transfixed by the black lenses squeezed onto the conical fatty pod. “Mister, could I have my ball back?” Baby Jewels’s tiny tasseled loafer kicked loose the red ball lodged beneath the bench. The boy scooped it up and scurried across the deck to peek back around his mother’s hip at the monster at the sternrail. His was the odorless musk of evil best sensed by animals and children.

  Beneath the tawny hills and crazy cantilevered homes of Sausalito the diesels roared in reverse and the ferry skidded on the tide, crashed, gulped broken water, slid, settled slowly into its slip. The common wharf stink of oil and tar and dead fish was scented with oranges. The gate lifted, the krauts jostled down the plank like apples fed down a chute into a press. An equally ruddy Australian delegation swarmed aboard, wearing khaki shorts and talking T-shirts.

  But where was the shvartze? Baby Jewels removed the wraparounds. Two eyes that could have been shaken from a box of tacks scanned the parking area. Briefly he experienced the terror of every blackmailer who knows if his bet is called there can be no winners, only twice the losers.

  Watching the ferry approach from his car, Gloria’s sugardaddy had seen his life pass before his eyes once already and was, like a film loop, returned to the beginning, his first recollections in that tin and tarpaper shack halfsunk in the Alameda mudflats, where his mother and he studied the Bible; hearing again her cadences worldweary and melodious metering the Oriental rhythms of Deuteronomy, Job, and Judges to the strident cries of marsh fowl … inhaling the cocaine coal, bonfiring my brain … the same birds that in a boy’s dreams clamored over the fishing boats of Galilee … memory’s all wavery, like things seen in flame … His mother, the slight and slighted granddaughter of slaves, first taught him that faith’s sinew was selfsacrifice … papers said strangled, I cant remember—the whitehot howling!—think maybe I clotheslined her when she called me that name, maybe to a doctor it could look the same … and he wondered at how far he’d come and how much faith worked until his flesh betrayed.

  The ferry was docking now. He spotted the fourhundredpound venereal wart spread across the sternrail and imagined it was mad Noah returning on a diesel ark to invoke once more the curse of Canaan. With a prayer that the brassy taste on his lips was not the final cup’s, he opened the car door.

  Tch. There the shvartze was—slinking between parked cars, sliding across the dock, scuttling up the plank; wearing a widebrimmed Stetson and long leather coat, sunglasses the size of frisbees and a preposterous stageprop beard. California Supreme Court Justice Lucius Carver Bell looking for all the world like an Eddy Street pimp on his way to sparrowhawk runaways at the bus station. Baby Jewels picked a lozenge from its scrolled tin and pushed it into an effeminate puckery smirk.

  The ferry tooted derisively as if it too was in on the joke; then roared, plowing a bluegreen bow wave back to San Francisco, gleaming like a Pacific Jerusalem across the waters. The day was lengthening, purpling the deep downtown defiles. The lowering slants of sun flamed the high windows and shone off the smaller houses spread across the city hill’s like carelessly strewn sugarcubes.

  The way Bell skulked around casing the ferry reminded Baby Jewels of an actor in a lowbudget thriller. His mirthful baby gurgle was lost on the wind. Didn’t the shvartze know the only suspicious person on board was himself in that cockamamy outfit?

  When the ferry passed within the huge cold crenellated shadow of Alcatraz—shrine to another pigeyed pimp, Al Capone—Judge Bell finally approached the stern in the wary, circuitous manner of a bird closing on food held by a hand that might snatch it. He perched at length on the stern bench, close enough to be heard over the wind and engines.

  “You better have a good reason for insisting on this meeting.” The judge’s implied threat was about as convincing as the shrubbery glued to his lips.

  “As good as yours for agreeing to it.” Seeing the judge stiffen, Baby Jewels pursed his lips amusedly. “A fivefootfour reason with a butter meringue keister and marzipan naynays.”

  “Cant you speak respectfully of the dead?” Bell weakly admonished.

  Twin folds of fat reared above the wraparounds. “I dont think she’d want respect any more dead than alive.”

  “The papers said they found partial prints.”

  “Yes. And skin beneath her nails.” Baby Jewels sighed. “Black.”

  The judge smacked a fist in his palm. “There’s an animal out there. I only pray they bring it to bay …”

  “Havent you learned to take care what you pray for?”

  “If they dont catch the killer it wont be the media’s fault.” Bell barked two ironic notes. “I wouldnt have thought a harlot’s murder would excite front page attention.”

  “A white harlot, your Honor … a black slayer. You of all people should be familiar with the emotions ignited by black on white.” He was alluding to Bell’s publicly scorned marriage to Daphne Riordan, a white heiress to a sugar fortune who was drummed out of the Junior League for posing nude in a national stroke rag. Her dowry included the Blue Jager Moon. It was less a marriage than uxorial hoax; she to taunt her race, he to tout his. Gloria Monday’s murder may have been page one; their miscegenetic nuptials fifteen years earlier made headlines.

  “Isnt it amusing,” chuckled Baby Jewels, “that marriage could be considered a greater outrage than murder.”

  Bell ignored the remark. “The apartment was ransacked. The police suspect narcotics. Paraphernalia was found.”

  “Yes. The crack pipe from which the partials were lifted. You would have been wise to remove that. But I suppose the crack blitzed your better judgment. Toxic psychosis, I believe it’s called. It might be a defense. But then you’d be the better judge o
f that.”

  The judge whirled on the bench. “I see your game, Moses. But if you try dragging me into this I’ll simply deny everything. I left nothing traceable. She paid for the apartment, the car, the clothing … she paid for everything with cash I gave her. In public I wore this disguise. We made restaurant reservations under assumed names, attended the theater inconspicuously in the gallery. I was … discreet.”

  “Not the night you shlepped her to the opera. Not the night before she was scrambled. Trying to be discreet with the Blue Moon’s like playing darts with cruise missiles. I still cant imagine a man of your intelligence slinging that rock around Gloria Monday’s neck. The ditz would have attracted less attention naked.”

  “Wha—?” Bell snatched off the outsized shades, half ungluing the ersatz whiskers to reveal the deep claw marks beneath.

  The Fat Man’s dewlaps shivered with hilarity. He produced a golden toothpick and plucked his pearly little teeth. It was a prearranged signal. From the rail circling the deckhouse roof, Quick flashed the diamond necklace, an electric blue burst like an exploding camera bulb instantly extinguished when Quick stepped back from view.

  Baby Jewels sucked a pink glob of lobster from the toothpick and waved the implement like a tiny baton, silencing the judge’s expostulant gulpings. “One of our girls found her and called us. From the apartment’s condition we deduced her killer had searched it for something without success. After we found the Blue Moon I had the police called anonymously.”

  “But I looked everywhere! I thought she removed it from the apartment, gave it to an accomplice.”

  “You have to understand that splendid oxymoron, a whore’s mentality, to know where one hides things.”

  Bell gestured between his legs. “Here?”

  “No. But you should have checked there first. It was in her douchebag …”

  Bell’s face collapsed like a struck tent repeating it, hearing her shriek it perhaps, “Douchebag? She was calling me that …”

  “No, the poor girl was trying to tell you where she hid it when you strangled her.”

  Justice Bell measured his words gingerly as gunpowder. “I beat her, yes. She was trying to shake me down. But I didnt kill her, not purposefully.”

  “As I said, a good lawyer might make a case for diminished capacity.”

  The judge collected himself with a deep breath. “How much must I pay for the diamond’s return? It’s worthless to you …”

  “Au contraire.” Sidney Greenstreet had nothing on Baby Jewels. “It’s worth far more than it would fetch on any diamond exchange.”

  “What are you driving at?” The sudden teeth in Bell’s voice were cut razorsharp from amputating courtroom dilations.

  “Just this, your Honor. If the police found it, they would have linked it to you, matched the partials and skin samples, and you’d be under arrest for murder. The same can happen any time in the future that the Blue Moon surfaces in connection with Gloria Monday. Any time I choose.”

  The judge slumped. He stared at the vicinity of his navel as though it were an opened plug and he were watching his life leak slowly out. Then he asked softly, “What is it you want from me?”

  It took the remainder of the ferry ride for Baby Jewels to explain. His plump beringed hand dismissed Bell’s halfhearted objections that he couldn’t interfere with grand jury proceedings. For starters Bell could use his influence to deliver the city’s black vote in exchange for Faria dropping the charges—“No deals, I’m talking dismissal.” Failing that, Bell could engineer the overturning of all Moses’s convictions in the Appellate Division. The court of last resort, of course, was Bell’s own.

  “I cant control which cases they hear,” Bell pleaded, “much less how they rule. No justice has that kind of influence.”

  “You better win yourself some. Start handing out markers to call in.”

  “The State Supreme Court isnt a political arm of government.” The mediagenic baritone was shredded to a parrot’s squawk.

  “Quid pro quo. I like the noble spin you lawyers put on things.”

  A light suddenly flared in Bell’s eyes. “The opera? … How did you know?”

  As quickly as they dented, the fatty brows smoothed themselves. “I have friends who attend the opera,” he said with deadpan irony. “How apt that it was The Rake’s Progress that evening. But my friends found the production so dismal they amused themselves surveying the audience. And mirabile dictu, they reported seeing you two. It’s only at my … encouragement that they havent reported the same to the boys on Bryant Street. The police would love toppling you. They know cutting your legs out would cripple every other black politico in the state. So you see, you have to cooperate. If not to save your own skin, then for the sake of every other who shares its color. You owe it to your … people.”

  The light guttered and died in the judge’s eyes. Bitterly he considered the unjust burden of the black man: that his glory was always the fleet exception to his race, but his shame forever its rule.

  “By the by,” smirked Baby Jewels, “did you know the Africans who originally mined the diamond called it the Devilstone? They believed it cursed anyone who carried it across water.”

  The roar of the ferry’s engines shuddered the pier buildings. Baby Jewels heaved his bulk upright, hugely crossed the deck; took the waiting arm of Quick Cicero at the head of the plank and descended to the Mercedes awaiting dockside.

  “What’s with the dumb disguise?” Quick wondered holding open the limo’s door. “They all look the same.”

  One last time Baby Jewels wetly chuckled at the forlorn spectacle of Bell slumped at the sternrail, clutching the phony beard which one last impish gust of wind had ripped entirely away, miserably conspiring against laws he was sworn to guard.

  THE SALLY

  Rooski crouched shivering inside a soggy refrigerator carton beneath the Bay Bridge. He listened to the mutter of traffic high above, waiting for rushhour when the police changed shifts and it was safest to move. When the cables hummed with a thousand idling engines and the girders screamed with horns, he scuttled from his hiding place down the garbage sloped high around the great abutment, tripping and falling, stumbling out of the roaring crisscrossed shadows onto the Embarcadero. Through the stalled traffic he bounded, all elbows, knees, and kangaroo ears, startling motorists as he jetéed past their windshields through the ultraviolet streetlamp vapors like a hobgoblin from a modernist ballet.

  He reached the Salvation Army on Harrison Street in ten minutes. The Sally was Rooski’s second home away from the home he never had, the first being jail. He took his place in the line stretching to the next block; attached his chinless profile to the sooty frieze of faces as stricken and bleak as the Tenderloin twilight. Beggars, bummies, and bindlestiffs of every bent; the hardtiming homeless street haunters whose hearts busted out just behind their luck. Men crouched against cold lightless buildings passing shortdogs of synthetic wine; women, many cradling a child on one arm and holding another by the hand, shifted uneasily on tired feet. Now and again someone bravely laughed when a joke was found not on himself.

  Once the Sally soldiers admitted them they thronged the transient lounge. Quickly the air grew close with sickly sweat and sour breath and sharp blue tobacco smoke; murky with nameless guilt, burdened with furtive regret. A hundred Sally feet scuffed fresh marks atop linoleum already tortured by a thousand others toiling beneath unseen crosses toward anonymous Calvaries.

  Rooski stood at a corner table beneath a stuttering fluorescent tube. He was trying to tailor a cigaret using a rolling machine whose greasy apron needed replacing several hundred smokes ago. Being legally blind without his glasses made it all the harder. For the third time his trembling fingers fumbled the tin roll bar, exploding Sally tobacco in his face.

  “Lemme hep,” offered an oldtimer with a face like ten miles of bad road. Deftly he tailored and
handed Rooski a cigaret and said sympathetically: “Usta be a firebreathin alkie my own damn self. First got into my daddy’s shine out back of the barn and it got worser n worser till I got them DDT’s. I shuck jist like you.”

  Rooski sobbed a lungful of smoke with a force that set his ears to flapping and hacked, “It aint buh-buh-booze givin me the whips n jingles. See, the shrink said I was socialist or sumptin and …”

  Suddenly vigilant, the oldtimer backpedaled a piece. “I dont truck with no cumniss,” he whistled through broken orange teeth. He spun clumsily on his heel to join the line forming at the messhall doors.

  Rooski shrugged, pointy shoulders nudging pink translucent ears. He didn’t mean to scare the old fart; probably should’ve just let him go on thinking he was a rummy. He couldn’t tell the truth, that he was fixing to shatter spontaneously from heroin withdrawal, like blown glass at a rock concert. The Barker drilled that into his head: never cop to your jones. Rooski was trying to blame his shakes on his multiple overdoses of electroshock. Only he could never remember the illness for which it was so frequently prescribed; that name he first heard when he was fourteen, sitting across the Youth Authority psychiatrist’s desk, asking: “What’s that fivecenter you called me?”

  Switching off the recorder, the Y.A. shrink crimped the corners of his mouth and said, “A sociopath? Oh just something somewhere between psychopath and K-mart Republican.”