Hillman went through the printouts again, and it wasn’t long before he found the answer to that question. Someone had called the police around midnight to report a burglary in progress after seeing a thin, dark-complexioned black male coming out of the alley that ran behind the bars and stores on Germantown Avenue. But the police hadn’t responded to the call.
When Hillman looked at the unit histories for the cars in the 39th, 25th, and 5th districts, he immediately saw the reason why. All of them had responded to the assist that was broadcast over J band when the rookie’s car flipped over on Roberts Avenue. The time for the assist was the same as the burglary in progress—midnight. And Hillman was willing to bet his life that Black was the burglar in the alley.
He had found what he needed. But he knew it wouldn’t be easy to convince Ramirez or anyone else that he was right. Still, he had to try.
As Hillman rushed from the Radio Room and headed back to the crime scene to find the lieutenant, he knew that the suspects would never be safe until the killers were found. He only hoped that the four of them could remain alive long enough for the true story to be told.
Chapter 12
B
lack and his companions had smoked so much crack that they couldn’t do anything but sit there with their mouths hanging open. In the part of their minds that hadn’t been vaporized along with the crack they’d burned in their straight shooters, they were all asking themselves the same question: How are we going to get out of this alive?
For Clarisse, the question was different. She was asking herself what she was doing there.
While Pookie sat in one corner of the room rocking back and forth, Leroy sat in the opposite corner staring into space.
They were all caught up in one of those awkward silences that sometimes falls over a crack house, only they were in a hotel room. But the effect was the same. It was the kind of moment when stark tragedy and pain are etched into the faces of everyone there.
Black stood by the window and absorbed the moment, afraid to turn around for fear someone would ask what he planned to do to get them out. He stood there and he waited, knowing that if the question was asked, he couldn’t provide the first clue as to what they had to do. Because as the radio droned on in the background, giving out their names and descriptions at what seemed like one-minute intervals, Black was becoming more and more afraid of what might happen next.
Images of police barreling into the room with guns blazing dominated his thoughts. He could actually feel the hot, stabbing sensation of the bullets and see the blood spattering the walls as they raised their hands in surrender. He could picture the serious look on the reporter’s face as he delivered his lines on the evening news, repeating the official police explanation as he told the world that the suspects had resisted arrest.
Black could even see some fat white guy in Northeast Philadelphia sitting at home and hollering into the kitchen for another beer as he told his wife, “Hey, Marge, they finally shot those niggers that killed the spick from city council!”
The more Black thought about it, the uglier the images became, so he tried not to think of anything. But just as he managed to clear his mind, the questions began.
“Black,” Leroy said quietly.
Black turned around and looked at him, but didn’t answer.
“Yo, man, how we gon’ get outta here?” he said.
Black hesitated, then turned to Clarisse, who sat on the bed and continued to scrape her straight shooter, seemingly oblivious to it all.
“We damn sure can’t use her car,” he said.
“Well, you might as well let me go, then,” Clarisse said, still scraping.
“For what? If we let you go, they’ll pick you up in five minutes. And by the time they get finished with you, you’ll say whatever they tell you to.”
“Why would I tell them anything about something I don’t know about?”
“ ’Cause they’ll kick yo’ ass if you don’t,” Leroy said.
“They might not even have to do that,” Black said. “They might just scare her into sayin’ she saw us do it.”
“They can’t scare me into doing anything,” Clarisse said.
“They can if they start sayin’ you the one pulled the trigger,” Black said.
“Well, they could never say that because they know I didn’t.”
“They probably know me and Leroy ain’t do it, either. You think that’s gon’ stop them from puttin’ it on us? Matter fact, what’s stoppin’ them from sayin’ you had somethin’ to do with it? First thing they probably say, ‘Yeah, well, you know we’re going to have to charge you as an accomplice, Miss Williams.’ They’ll probably have you down there signin’ all kind o’ stuff.”
“No they won’t.”
“Yeah right,” Pookie said, speaking from the corner as she continued to rock back and forth. “What makes you so much better than everybody else?”
“What?” Clarisse said. “I know you’re not talking—”
“You don’t know shit,” Pookie said. “You ain’t gon’ sit there and tell me that if they gave you the choice between going to jail for life and snitchin’, you would be like, ‘Oh no, I could never tell on someone. It’s unethical.’ ”
Black laughed at Pookie’s imitation of Clarisse.
“That’s her problem,” Pookie said. “She think she the only one ever had somethin’. Lookin’ at us like we ain’t nothin’. You know what I was before I started smokin’? I was a management trainee at Bell. Not sayin’ that’s a whole lot, but it’s better than this.”
“Look, Pookie,” Black said. “Wasn’t nobody even talkin’ to you.”
“So what?” she said, standing up and coming over by the window to stand beside him. “You another one, Black. Swear you so smart. Swear you know everything. Well, if you know so much, why we ain’t gone yet? Why you standin’ there lookin’ out the window when you know they could come runnin’ up in here any minute and knock all of us off?”
“Leroy, come get your woman,” Black said, turning his back on Pookie so she couldn’t see the truth of her words reflected on his face.
“Leroy can’t do nothin’ to me! He ain’t my man. If he was my man, if he was a man at all, if he cared anything about me or hisself, we wouldn’t be sittin’ here waitin’ for you to figure a way outta this. If Leroy could take the time to be a man, maybe try to get hisself together for a minute, he could get all this.”
She swept her hand up and down her body in case they couldn’t see clearly enough what Leroy could get.
“Hold up,” Leroy said. “I could get all what? What I want with you? You everybody woman.”
“Now, that’s where you wrong,” she said. “How many men you seen me do somethin’ with since I been out here?”
Leroy opened his mouth to speak, but he was too slow.
“Let me give you the answer to that ’fore you blow up the damn room tryin’ to think. None. Zero. I don’t do nothin’ out here, but you too stupid to see that. The only one that has ever done more than touch me in the last year and a half I been out here is you, Leroy. You know why? ’Cause I thought I could feel somethin’ for a ninety-nine-cent rice-and-gravy-eatin’ nigger like you. But I guess I was wrong again.”
“Keep talkin’, you gon’ be a whole lot more than wrong,” Leroy said.
“Man, that don’t move me,” Pookie said. “You can’t do nothin’ to me I ain’t already do to myself. I lost everything it is to lose ’fore I even got out here like this. So if I lose some blood, if I lose a couple of teeth, if I lose my life out here, it don’t even matter.”
“Pookie,” Black said, “why don’t you sit down?”
By then it was too late to stop her. She ignored Black, ignored Leroy, and focused her venom on Clarisse, who had stopped scraping her straight shooter and was looking at Pookie as if she were an evangelist preaching the gospel.
“I had a house,” she said, looking at Clarisse with contempt. “Right up there in Mount Airy. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, wall-to-wall carpet. Shit was nice. I had a car. I had a boyfriend. I had all that. I had clothes and jewelry and a bank account. I had a family.”
Pookie’s tough exterior crumbled slightly as she paused to swipe at her eyes.
“I had a life!” she said, raising her voice to a high-pitched, broken squeal.
They were all caught up in the passion of her words, reflecting on what they meant to each of them. Pookie swiped at her eyes again. And when she realized that there were no tears, she looked at her fingers in wonderment, then went on as if she had never stopped.
“That wasn’t enough, though. I had to have more than everybody else. My man wasn’t the richest guy in the world. But he gave me everything he could with what he had. He gave me jewelry every now and then, paid the bills. We was even savin’ up to buy another house.
“But I knew I could get a whole lot more than that if I played a little bit, so that’s what I did. And it was cool for a while. You know, I’d go meet my little boyfriends, get what I could get from ’em, and come on home. It wasn’t about fallin’ in love or nothin’. It was strictly about gettin’ mine. It wasn’t about what I wasn’t gettin’ from my man, either, ’cause like I said, he was givin’ me everything I needed.
“But after a while it was like, I ain’t want to come home no more, ’cause I couldn’t stand lookin’ in his face knowin’ what I was doin’. I guess I thought he might o’ knew or whatever. When I think about it now, though, I know he didn’t know. ’Cause the more I would stay out late, the more I told him, ‘Not tonight,’ the more I pulled away from him, the harder he tried. He loved me like that, but I ain’t care.
“It was like, I was gettin’ the clothes and the jewelry and the money—all the things I said I wanted—and I was still feelin’ like shit. That ain’t stop me, though. I kept duckin’ and I kept dodgin’. I kept slippin’ and I kept dippin’. And if you asked me now what I was lookin’ for when I was doin’ all that, I couldn’t even tell you.”
They all looked at Pookie, then at one another, comparing her story to their own. Black stood by the window and wondered how long it had been since she had talked. And he wondered even more how long it had been since anyone had listened.
He wanted to say something to console her. He wanted to tell her that he knew what she was going through, because he was going through it himself. But by the time he fixed his lips to say something, Pookie began to speak again.
“So one day this guy beeps me,” she said, her hands moving to the rhythm of her words. “Old nigger with plenty cash. I’m talkin’ ’bout this nigger was paid, you hear me?”
She stopped long enough to allow them to imagine how paid he was.
“He beeped me, and I had to call him up a couple o’ times before I caught up with him. When I finally got him, he asked me to meet him at this jazz club downtown. Not that I expected him to say anything different, ’cause that’s all he used to want to do—just be seen with me at the jazz shows.
“ ‘Just smile and look pretty, baby.’ That’s what he used to tell me—‘just smile and look pretty.’ So that’s what I did. I smiled and hung on his arm like his old ugly-ass was Denzel or somebody. I just figured it wasn’t no thing, you know. Nigger was givin’ up five hundred dollars just to take me to a show, so I was smilin’ my ass off. Wasn’t like we was screwin’, right?”
They didn’t respond, knowing that it was futile to offer an opinion. She waited half a second, in case one of them tried to challenge her, and then she went on.
“Well, on this particular night, somethin’ just ain’t feel right,” Pookie said. “It was like somethin’ was out of place, like somethin’ was gettin’ ready to happen. But the longer the show went on, the more I felt like I was bein’ silly to think that.
“The music was corny, as usual. The drinks was watered down, as usual. The waitress rolled her eyes at me all night long, as usual. And the owner of the club tried to crack on me when I went to the bathroom, as usual.
“At the end of the night, when he pulled up at the corner of my block, dude handed me an envelope like he always did, and I put it in my pocketbook, like I always did, and kissed him on the cheek. But when I got ready to get out of the car, he said he had forgot to give me somethin’.”
Pookie smiled when she said that.
“Now ya know I wasn’t goin’ nowhere when he said that, right?” she said, smiling even harder. “ ’Cause Trish wasn’t leavin’ nothin’ behind that was free, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Trish?” Leroy said, making it sound like an alien word. “Who Trish?”
“Who you think?” Pookie said. “My name ain’t no damn Pookie. I made that up so I ain’t have to tell nobody out here my real name. But that’s messed up now, too, ain’t it? Y’all got my name on the radio like it’s number three on the countdown.
“Patricia Oaks! Patricia Oaks! They mess around and throw a beat behind it and have niggers dancin’ to it.”
“Ain’t nobody get your name on the radio but you,” Black said. “ ’Cause if you wouldn’t o’ never got the man shot in the first place, none o’ this wouldn’t be happenin’.”
“Whatever,” Pookie said. “I ain’t even gon’ argue with you.”
Pookie went back to the corner, put her head between her knees, folded her arms around her legs, and began to rock again. Black looked out the window and began to think of where they would go and how they would get there, wondering but not really caring what the end of Pookie’s story would have been if she had finished it.
It wasn’t like he needed to hear the end anyway. He already knew the story’s end, because he knew his own. And knowing his own tragedy was enough. He didn’t want to have to listen to it, too. He didn’t want to hear much of anything. All he wanted to hear was that everything they had gone through was nothing more than a pipe dream: something that would go away in a few minutes, like the ghostly puffs of crack smoke that shrouded their broken lives in tattered cloaks of fantasy.
It wasn’t that easy, though. Because the more Black tried to push Pookie’s story to the back of his mind, the more it tried to push itself to the surface. It was like someone who was fighting to keep from drowning. It would go down, then suddenly bound back to the surface, hands flailing wildly against the water.
After all, Black was just like Pookie. But he hadn’t sold his smile, or his beauty. No, he had sold something far more valuable than that—his future. And he had sold it for far less than the five hundred dollars she got for a night of cloying smiles and watered-down liquor. He had sold it for a hit.
But they’d all sold their futures, Black thought. Weren’t they selling themselves even now, giving up their lives in exchange for a high that wasn’t legal tender anywhere except their minds? Or had they been sold, shipped across the airwaves like their ancestors had been shipped across the ocean; sold to the highest bidder like Kunta Kinte; sold to a judicial system eager to gorge itself on their misery . . .
“Patricia,” Clarisse said, snatching Black’s mind from its free fall.
Pookie stopped rocking and raised her head from her knees.
“Is that where you got your first hit?” Clarisse asked timidly.
“What?” Pookie said, sounding irritated.
“The old man,” Clarisse said. “Is that who turned you out?”
Pookie laughed. It was a hearty sound that Black had never heard her make before.
“Giiirrrrl,” Pookie said between fits of laughter, “you been watchin’ too many
Mod Squad
reruns, ’cause I swear to God, I ain’t heard nobody say ‘turned out’ since like 1975.”