by Rick Bennet
ALSO BY RICK BENNET
KING OF A SMALL WORLD
Copyright © 1996, 2011 by Rick Bennet
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-550-2
1
HE’S AN ACTOR, A STREET PERFORMER, this homeless black man in his layers of ragged clothes, with his bearded face and dreadlocked hair, sitting idly on a sidewalk across from the White House. His name is Bobby Jay He says he’s a preacher. Preacher Bobby Jay.
Not too many blocks away, another black man, pudgy, balding, bespectacled Henry james, Washington’s top prosecutor, sits on his living room couch, looking out the rain-speckled window to the glistening, shadowed street, grateful for his home’s warmth and light, comfortable in his slacks and sweater.
A group of well-dressed Japanese tourists stands before Preacher. Although it’s night and they have an almost paranoid fear of America’s legendary violence, they think they’ll be safe here, so near the President. They see Preacher’s cardboard sign, saying: ASK ME ANYTHING FOR I KNOW IT ALL. ONE DOLLAR.
One of the tourists asks if it’s true, as he read in the paper back home, that Washington will soon explode in race riots. The Japanese, having some tradition of believing beggars to be wise men, listen sincerely to Preacher’s answer.
Henry James’s wife, Jessica, joins him on the couch in their comfortable living room. She’s his age. White. Blond. Not pretty to most people, but he’s not handsome, and neither of them cares much about such things. They met in law school and fell immediately, easily, in love. They communicate without talking; share the same views on issues they argue about.
They have a beautifully refurbished three-story stone row house near Dupont Circle. She has a successful private legal practice; he’s the Henry James, famous for his extraordinary trial-win percentage. They have two beautiful, healthy, bright children, a twelve-year-old boy, upstairs in his room, and an eight-year-old girl, spending the night with her grandmother, Henry’s mother, who lives a short distance but far world from here.
Preacher, for the tourists, waves his arms and twists his body and dances with his words, melodramatic and grandiloquent on his minor stage, the overhead streetlamp for a spotlight, an entertainer in his own way.
“You ask me if the riots are coming? Ask me as well if the war is coming. If blacks will get their guns. If whites will. Ask me as well if there is something special happening here, and I say no!”
He pauses. Winks. Says, “We’ve always been this way.”
The phone rings. Jessie answers it. It’s Henry’s mother. She and Jessie talk a few minutes. They get along very well.
Jessie hands the phone to Henry. He hears his daughter on the other end, asking, “Daddy, do I have to go to bed now? “
“When you spend the night with Grandma, you go to sleep when she does.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“Hon, if you don’t go to bed now, your uncle Long is going to get you.”
The girl goes quiet.
Jessie tsks at her husband. “You shouldn’t do that.” He smiles.
“The kids think Long is the bogeyman,” Jessie says.
Henry laughs. He hears his daughter asking her grandmother if it’s true that Uncle Long will get her. He hears his mother take the phone and say, “Henry!”
After good nights are said all around and the phone hung up and a minute passes, Jessie asks, “Do you know where he is?”
“Long?” Henry asks, then shakes his head no.
“He’s been out a month now?” Jessie asks.
Henry nods. “Mr. Long Ray. Convicted three times for murder but back on the street. I never forget that he’s my brother, but he should be locked up for life. He’ll kill again, or be killed. It’s how he reacts to life’s challenges. Three strikes is too many for men like him. Two strikes is.”
The Japanese tourists applaud Preacher, amused. They find dollars for him.
Three young black men in low-slung jeans, bulbous jackets, and face-hiding ball caps come up, and the Japanese, having seen such men in rap videos and Hollywood movies, move quickly off.
The first young black man, anger in his eyes, pushes Preacher out of his way. Preacher nods and tries to duck away, but the second young man is behind him now, saying, “What’s up, motherfucker? What you doing here? You think that President motherfucker in there, you think he give a fuck what you say?”
The third young man, seeing Preacher’s sign, kicks it away and says, “Tell me this, know-it-all fool. You so smart, how come you living on the street? Huh?”
Preacher knows better than to talk back to them. He just says, “Okay, okay, uh-huh, uh-huh, that’s all right,” lowly, to himself, looking down.
The first young man pushes Preacher again. Hard. Preacher falls to the ground. The young men, disgusted, walk on.
It was raining earlier; it rains again now. And though it’s April, the temperature drops to close to freezing.
Preacher walks up an alley, debating where to spend the night. He has two regular places: the basement of his recently deceased grandmother’s house, where she let him stay when it got cold; and the back-alley sheltered doorway of a restaurant, whose owners feed him sometimes because his presence there prevents burglaries. He prefers the doorway because it’s downtown, and his grandmother’s house is isolated in a warehouse district a far walk or complicated combination of bus rides from here. He goes to the restaurant now.
When he gets to the doorway, he pulls his blankets from the duffel bag in which he carries his belongings and curls up in them. He’s out of the rain but not warm.
Jessie rubs Henry’s shoulders. She knows how much stress he’s been under. He was publicly adamant about his belief that O. J. Simpson was guilty, and because he was a black man with that view, he got a lot of media attention.
“It’s the racial crap that hurts the most,” he says bitterly. “Calling me an Uncle Tom because I prosecute black men. What sense does that make? Thirty years ago white juries acquitted whites who killed blacks, and called the prosecutors nigger-lovers. Now it’s the other way around.”
“A natural swing of the pendulum.”
“No. There’s no pendulum. There’s no excuse.”
Jessie keeps rubbing his shoulders. Says, “Shhh.” Quick as she is to jump into the intellectual fray with him, she also knows when he’s just venting. Lets him.
The doorbell rings. And though their neighborhood is a good one, still, it’s the city, it’s night.
Henry pulls back the front window curtain. Sees a clean-shaven, short-haired white man at the door, in a suit and tie. If it had been a black male in a hooded sweatshirt, maybe one of those young men who hassled Preacher, Henry might not have opened the door. But it’s a suit-and-tie white man, in Washington. Why wouldn’t yo
u open the door?
2
CATHERINE “PASSER” JONES SITS at her steel-gray desk In her dismal gray office, exhausted. She was out all night on a surveillance. Witness location. Reluctant witness. Passer had heard of a club this witness frequented. Tailed her to her boyfriend’s apartment at four in the morning. Saw the lights go out at five. It’s six now.
Passer called and left a message for the client, a lawyer, about where he could find this witness, and then came here to wait for her boss, Kevin Kellogg. He was at a crap game. She paged him. Told him she needed money. Told him to get his ass over here and pay her before he went broke again.
She drinks black coffee. Smokes. Moves to the couch.
Lies down. Closes her eyes. Doesn’t sleep.
She’s twenty-four. She shares an apartment with an accountant, a woman, who shops, cooks, cleans, dates, remembers birthdays, and works regular hours. Passer does none of those things. Passer works a lot, writes a little, exercises some, and sleeps when she gets the chance. She’s been working as an operative under Kellogg’s private investigator license for two years. She loves the job when she doesn’t hate it. Stretched out now on the tattered brownish office couch, she hates it. She’s dressed in black boots, blue jeans, black windbreaker with shoulder pads, and an Orioles ball cap; she keeps her hair cut short so that anyone walking past as she sits in a car overnight thinks she’s a man, not a victim. Spending the night in a car, pissing into a bedpan with a newspaper on her lap, isn’t as thrilling as it used to be, but it’s her life, and she’s taking it for a while.
The office door opens. Kevin Kellogg comes in, with his secretary, Sue Cline, right behind. Kellogg is fifty years old. Medium height, grossly overweight, blotchy white skin, thinning white hair. He’s dressed in billowing black pants held up by black suspenders; rumpled white shirt unbuttoned at the top; loose red tie; scuffed, never polished black shoes. Dressed as he always is. Every day, work or not. In a courtroom, at the racetrack, hearing a client, shooting dice, it’s all the same to him. He’s single. Never married. Lives in a downtown hotel. Owns a closet and dresser of clothes; this business and its equipment and furniture; an old Pontiac that used to be a taxi and still looks like one; nothing else.
Sue Cline is a short, plain woman in her thirties. Wal-Mart shopper, wearer. Uneducated formally or otherwise. A natural redhead from West Virginia, hired because when she borrowed money from Kellogg at the track and promised to pay him back the next day, she’d driven a hundred miles through a snowstorm to do it.
Kellogg’s grumpy. Doesn’t look at Passer as she sits up. Passer shakes her head, ready to be angry.
“I don’t want to hear your shit, Kevin,” she says.
“Shut up.”
“You shut up. Asshole.”
“She rubs her eyes.
“Don’t worry, Pass,” Sue says. “We’re all right.”
“Were you with him?”
“Yeah. The stakes were too small for him to lose it all. Black Television Network paid us cash for the Ottaway case. Four thousand.”
Passer stands, relieved. “BTN paid us cash? Tell me you’re going to settle me up?”
Sue nods. Reaches into her purse. Takes out an envelope. Says, “I saved three hundred off the top—Kevin, are you listening?”
He grunts.
“I saved three hundred off the top to clear our tab with the Koreans.”
The Korean owners of the twenty-four-hour coffee shop on this building’s street level let them run a tab, which Kellogg covers. It’s the staff’s perk. Their second office.
Sue continues, “And I took eighteen hundred for the rent, last month’s and next’s.”
“That’s got to come from legal income,” Kellogg says. “If we have cash receipts from the landlord, then we have to admit we paid him cash, which means we have to admit we got paid cash or have a cash withdrawal of that much, which we don’t have, which means we’d have to pay taxes on it.”
“I understand that better than you,” Sue says testily.
“But since we don’t have enough in the bank to pay the rent, what am I supposed to do?”
“We’re collecting from Barneson and Row this week. That’ll cover it.”
Sue isn’t convinced but lets it go. “Make sure BTN knows not to file anything with our name on it,” she says.
“They know, they know. They don’t want any record of this, either. That’s why they paid us this way.”
“Can you take care of the in-house shit later?” Passer asks.
“Sure,” Sue says sympathetically. “You got seventeen hundred coming, right?” Passer nods.
“What?” Kellogg says, incredulous. “That can’t be right.”
“I haven’t been paid in three weeks, Kevin,” Passer says. “And I’m in no mood for bullshit.”
“She has to be paid on the books,” Kellogg says.
Passer is ready to explode. “If the client is off the books, then so is my pay!”
“Pass,” Sue says, “you billed five-forty on that case. That much I’ll give you cash for. The rest I’ll also give you cash for, but you’ll have to sign a check back to us later and pay us the deductions then.”
“Fine, fine,” Passer says.
Sue counts out her money. Hands it over. Passer takes it. Leaves. Bangs the door behind her as she does.
Kellogg shrugs. “She acts like she’s the one who bet the don’t against eight straight passes.”
“Really,” Sue says. “Imagine expecting to get paid on time. The nerve of some people.”
“Heh, heh, heh,” Kellogg says, mocking laughter.
“Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh.”
“Shut up, Kevin.” He laughs for real.
Kellogg goes into his windowless, chipping-green-painted, industrial-carpeted office. Sits in his comfortable chair at his broad desk, cluttered, as is the whole room, with equipment. He does most of his work here, at his desk. Using his computer, his phone, his fax.
He’s not going to sleep this morning, so he drinks from his coffeepot. Straight from it. He’s put masking tape on its lip so as not to burn himself. He drinks two, three, four pots a day. Smokes that many packs of cigarettes. Eats bacon, ham, eggs, and pancakes for breakfast, hamburgers and fries for lunch, steak or fried chicken for dinner. Doughnuts with the breakfast, ice cream with the lunch, cake with the dinner. Pie late at night. Candy bars anytime.
He drinks from the pot, sets it down. Lights a cigarette. Rolls, in his chair, to the cabinet with the Ottaway file. Pulls it. Looks at it. Thinks about it.
The woman he dealt with at Black Television Network asked him if it wouldn’t make sense for him to get rid of any evidence that he’d taken the job, in case the IRS looked into it.
There’s a set of still photos of the target, Michael Ottaway, with Passer at a bar. Passer was using the name “Sheila.” She was made up, and dressed and acted, like a light-skinned black girl for the part. They got photos of her looking scared and intimidated at the bar as Ottaway leered at her. More damaging than the photos, though, are the cassette tapes of the phone calls.
Kellogg plays the best tape.
He hears Passer’s voice say, sleepily, “Hello?”
Ottaway, husky-voiced: Hey, baby.
Passer: Oh, you’re finally calling me? I thought you said we were going to a party last night.
Ottaway: We are, baby. It’s starting right now.
Passer: What kind of a party starts at … two in the morning?
Ottaway: The best kind. My kind. Private kind.
Passer: You’re supposed to be Michael Ottaway, executive producer, not Michael Ottaway, party thrower. (She was careful to work his full name into the conversation.)
Ottaway: I keep telling you, this is the entertainment business. Now it’s time you started entertaining me.
Passer: Let’s be professional about this. You keep saying I’ll get that job, but it doesn’t happen.
Ottaway: You got to understand, if you want me to
do for you, you have to do for me.
Passer, after hesitating: Mr. Ottaway, if I come over there … do I get the job?
Ottaway: Yeah, baby. You just got to handle this little audition.
Kellogg hears the urgency in Ottaway’s voice. He shakes his head, embarrassed for the man, disgusted by him. Passer said later she couldn’t believe how blind Ottaway was. She was worried, at the time, about being too obvious.
Kellogg lies down on the couch. Nods off. Gets woken by Sue Cline a few hours later.
He looks at his watch and sees it’s not time for his meeting. Looks at her face and sees there’s something else.
She points to the television. News report.
Henry and Jessica James were found murdered this morning.
3
A BLACK POLICE OFFICER COMES DOWN the front steps of the James house. His longtime partner, a white man, is leaning back against their patrol car, looking up at the overcast early-morning sky.
“They’re not letting anyone in,” the black officer says.
“They’re paranoid. Look how many press dogs are already here.”
“I got the scoop, though. Decapitated, both of them.”
“No fuck! You see the bodies?”
“Wouldn’t let me in for that. But I talked to Johnson— she’s first officer—and she told me.”
“What she say?”
The black officer laughs. “Okay, check this out. She gets the call, with her partner. They go in and they see a blood trail, like the garbage man that called this in saw through the back door, which was open. So, you know, they got their guns up, and they go in through the kitchen, and in the living room they see the bodies. The partner, he goes on upstairs, you know, looking to see if the perp’s still here, while Johnson, she goes to check the bodies for life. Now, you know, she sees the blood, all this ton of blood, but still she’s got to check for life, you never know. But she’s also got her gun out and she’s looking around because the premises isn’t secured yet, so she’s really only looking at the bodies out of the corner of her eye. She puts her hand on the woman’s neck, wanting to feel body temperature or a pulse or something, and the fucking head falls off!”