He said that he and his wife had watched the officers break into the house almost immediately after they got there.
“Okay,” she said, pausing in a way that she thought would let him know how serious her next question was. “I want you to think about this, Mr. Scott, because we need to double-check this. Was Miss Williams, or anybody else, there when the officers searched her home?”
Scott, sounding suspicious, told her that she should already know the answer to that.
“We’re just double-checking the information that was given to us by the officers on the scene,” Deveraux said quickly.
Scott ignored her explanation and asked why she was calling instead of Lieutenant Ramirez.
“Well, Mr. Scott,” she said, trying to come up with a commonsense answer. “Almost the entire Homicide Unit is working on this case, including myself. My job, to put it simply, is to check behind the other officers.”
Scott didn’t say anything.
“Are you there, Mr. Scott?”
When he said yes, she went into her pitch.
“I want you to listen very carefully, Mr. Scott, because this is extremely important. We’re going to need you to answer a few questions about what you saw last night. So what I want you to do is to come down to the Roundhouse as soon as possible. Do you know where it is?”
Eldridge said there wasn’t a black man in Philadelphia who didn’t know the location of the Roundhouse.
Deveraux smiled. She was beginning to appreciate the old man’s wit.
“I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” she said. “And we’ll go up to my office from there.”
Eldridge said he didn’t own a car.
“Catch a cab, Mr. Scott. We’ll pay for it. And do me a favor. Don’t discuss this with anyone until you talk to me. My name is Officer Deveraux, and I’ll be here in the parking lot in one of our undercover vehicles. It’s a black GMC Jimmy truck.”
Eldridge said he’d have to wait for his wife to get dressed, but that he’d be there as soon as possible. He made sure to add that he was only cooperating because he thought it might help Clarisse.
“Oh, any additional information you can give to us will definitely help Clarisse, Mr. Scott,” Deveraux said. “It’ll be of invaluable assistance to her.”
Deveraux disconnected the call, smiling ear to ear.
“What’re you cheesing about?” her cameraman said.
“The police broke into Clarisse Williams’s house and searched it without a warrant.”
“That’s an illegal search.”
“I know,” Deveraux said. “Now all we have to do is get this guy and his wife to say they saw them do it.”
“What are you gonna do when they get down here and see that you’re not a cop?” the cameraman said.
“You’re going to point the camera at them, I’m going to identify myself as a reporter, and then I’m going to ask them to name the officers they saw go into Clarisse Williams’s house to conduct the search,” she said.
Deveraux looked over at Sergeant Harris, who stood by the door of the Roundhouse reading yet another meaningless statement to an unenthusiastic media corps.
“Then we’ll get the little spokesperson to comment,” she said. “At least that’ll give her something to think about other than those bullshit statements she’s been reading all morning.”
With a self-satisfied smirk, Deveraux walked over to their news truck to wait for the Scotts to arrive.
As she did so, Lieutenant Darren Morgan left his office window, where he had watched Deveraux hand the envelope to the woman from Reports Control. He sat down at his desk and beeped Sheldon. When he called back, Morgan told him about the reporter.
“I just saw one of the girls from Reports Control talking to Jeanette Deveraux,” Morgan said, talking quickly. “Deveraux handed the girl an envelope and the girl handed her something back. I’m not sure what it was. But Deveraux made a call and now she’s down in the parking lot waiting for somebody.”
“Is she alone?”
“No, she’s got a cameraman with her.”
A bead of sweat made its way from Sheldon’s hairline to the corner of his mouth, and the questions that floated on the edge of his consciousness began to filter into his mind: What if the envelope contained a document that could bring their entire operation crashing to the ground? What if Deveraux was cooperating with a politician who was going to turn state’s evidence against them?
Sheldon closed his eyes and tried to force the ugly images from his mind. When his thoughts slowed to a normal pace, he managed to ask a question. “Has she done anything unusual?”
Morgan got up from his desk, walked over to the window, and watched as Deveraux sat in her truck with the cameraman. She hadn’t moved from that spot since she’d talked to the woman from Reports Control.
“She’s the only reporter who isn’t talking to the sergeant from Community Relations,” Morgan said, walking back to his desk. “I’m guessing she knows something the rest of them don’t.”
Sheldon ran his hands through his hair. “Look. I don’t know what Deveraux knows, but whatever it is, we can’t afford to have it become public knowledge. We want a nice, smooth little investigation and quick arrests in this thing, and I think we both know that isn’t going to happen if Deveraux gets any inside information. So I want you to handle it.”
“Okay,” Morgan said, trying to rush off the phone before Sheldon asked any more questions. “I’ll handle it.”
“Before you go, what happened with the guy at the hospital?”
Morgan hesitated. He didn’t know if it was the right time to talk to Sheldon about Moore. And truthfully, he didn’t know if it would ever be the right time. Because what he’d heard on the tape was gnawing at him. And the more he talked with Sheldon, the more he became convinced that his feeling about the tape was right.
“Morgan, you there?”
“Yeah, I was just . . . Look, I ran into something at the hospital. There was a reporter named Henry Moore. He had a tape of a detective interrogating the Thomas guy.”
“So what did you do?” Sheldon said, hoping that Morgan hadn’t gone too far.
“I killed him.”
“You did
what
?” Sheldon said, looking around the Command Center self-consciously when he realized how loudly he was speaking.
“Look,” Morgan said. “It had to be done. He was going to publish a story with Darnell Thomas saying the shooter was a white man.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Sheldon stopped in his tracks and hoped that he was hearing Morgan wrong. “What did you say?”
“Darnell Thomas told Detective Hillman that the shooter was a tall white man with blond hair and blue eyes, wearing a white shirt, black pants, and a gold link bracelet. Somehow, Moore got a tape of the interrogation. And to make a long story short, he was going to write a story saying that we’re pursuing the wrong suspects for the Podres shooting.”
Sheldon tried to speak, but his voice would no longer come out of his mouth. Instead, it streamed from his pores in a cold sweat, screaming out like it was awakening from Sheldon’s worst nightmare. It shook in his hands, trembling against the cold truth. Sheldon was afraid. So he did what he hoped was the right thing. He tried to make light of Butter’s accusation.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said, his uncertain voice trembling along with his hands. “A white man in a crack house killing Podres is a real stretch. Even if Moore did write the story, nobody would’ve believed it. That’s why I don’t understand why you had to kill him.”
“Look,” Morgan said. “I took his wallet and his watch and everything. I even dropped a couple of empty caps in the car. They’ll call it a robbery, blame it on a piper, and go on to the next case.”
“You’re right. Maybe they will blame a piper. Or maybe they’ll start wondering why the only reporter to get close to the only suspect we have in custody is suddenly dead. That was sloppy, Morgan. And it was stupid.”
Morgan had taken all that he could from Sheldon. And he was growing tired of the charade. So he just came out and said it. “It wasn’t as stupid as killing Podres.”
Before the words had even left Morgan’s mouth, the tremors in Sheldon’s hands became violent shudders. The cold sweat ran hot over his skin. Then the heat and the trembling converged in a blanket of fear that smothered him and took his breath away.
“Are you there?” Morgan said. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” Sheldon said, squeezing his words between short, panting breaths. “I just dropped the phone.”
“I see,” Morgan said, picturing Sheldon sweating on the other end. “You know, it’s funny how descriptions make us think of the people we know. I mean, a tall white man with blond hair and blue eyes could be anybody. But when you throw in the white shirt, that could be a captain’s uniform shirt. Black pants could be part of the uniform, too. And even though I’ve never seen you in a gold link bracelet, who knows what you’ve got in your little jewelry box.”
Sheldon was starting to hyperventilate. With each word Morgan spoke, his head felt as if it were growing heavier. He just knew that if Morgan said one more word, his head was going to explode.
“Look, Irv, I just wish you would’ve told me what you were going to do before you went out and killed Podres.”
“No,
you
look. I don’t care what some crack head on his deathbed told Hillman. Leroy and Black killed Podres. Not a white man. And especially not a white man who looks like me. Now, if you meant that
they
were stupid to kill him, you’re right. They were. And Darnell Thomas was stupid to be a part of it. So now he’s making up some phony description that could be anybody. But it’s not going to work, is it, Morgan? Because Darnell Thomas, and Leroy, and Black are going to have to pay the consequences for their actions, right? They’re going to have to pay.”
In that moment, everything that they’d done in the last few years seemed to flash in front of Morgan. All the shakedowns, all the schemes, all the bribes. All of it ran across the screen that was his mind and he knew that it was over. And now it was just a matter of cleaning up the loose ends.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he finally said. “They do have to pay the consequences for their actions. We all do.”
Sheldon didn’t respond. But he knew what Morgan meant. It was over. They would both have to try to get out while they could. It was every man for himself now. But neither of them could say it. And so they continued their conversation as if things could remain the same after that, knowing deep inside that things would never be the same again.
As he put the phone back in its cradle, Irv Sheldon did the only thing he could do. He took off the heavy gold link bracelet and slipped it into his pocket, along with the rest of his memories of the late Johnny Podres.
He didn’t think he’d have to worry about Hillman doing anything with the description. He would do what he was told, just like he’d always done. But Jeanette Deveraux was a different story. Sheldon wondered how much she really knew. And he wondered if she had shared that knowledge with whomever she had called from the parking lot of police headquarters.
Mildred Scott woke to the sound of her husband holding a stilted telephone conversation with someone he obviously didn’t feel very comfortable talking to. After he hung up, she turned to him, hoping that he had received some good news about Clarisse.
“Who was that on the phone, Eldridge?” she said, her voice laced with worry.
“Some woman talkin’ ’bout she from Homicide.”
“They ain’t ask you enough questions last night?”
“That’s the same thing I was thinkin’,” Eldridge said. “All them questions they asked me last night and then somebody gon’ call with some more? Make it so bad, the woman ain’t even sound right.”
“What you mean she ain’t sound right?” Mildred said. “How she supposed to sound?”
“She supposed to at least know what she talkin’ about,” Eldridge said. “And she didn’t. Now, I don’t know if she think I’m stupid ’cause I’m old or ’cause I’m black or whatever. But seem to me like the woman was just tryin’ to get me to tell her about what happened over there last night.”
“What she ask you?”
“A whole bunch o’ questions about whether the police went in Clarisse house, and was anybody home when they went in there, and what cops went in there, and all kind o’ foolishness.
“Then she had the nerve to say, ‘Get in a cab and meet me in the parkin’ lot down the Roundhouse, and don’t discuss this with anybody till you talk to me.’ ”
“What?” Mildred said in disbelief.
“Yeah, like I’m supposed to believe that nonsense,” Eldridge said. “I must either sound like the biggest fool Jesus ever died for, or she is the biggest fool. ’Cause ain’t no way in the world I’m gon’ meet somebody in the parkin’ lot o’ the Roundhouse talkin’ about they a cop when I know they ain’t.”
“What was the woman’s name?” Mildred asked.
“She said her name was Deveraux.”
Mildred paused for a moment.
“It’s a woman on the news named Deveraux-somethin’-or-other,” she said thoughtfully.
“You think that’s who it was?” Eldridge said.
“I don’t know. But you need to call that detective that was here last night and ask him if somebody named Deveraux works with them. If he say it’s all right, I don’t see no harm in goin’ down there and talkin’ to her.”
“That woman wasn’t bit more the police than the man in the moon,” Eldridge said.
“Well, it won’t hurt to check, will it, Eldridge?”
The way she said his name—in that singsong way that always tended to calm him—made Eldridge think of Clarisse. She was so sweet once; a little girl whose big, sparkling eyes could melt away the most sour disposition.
But now she was gone. She had probably been gone for a long time. It was just hard to tell because she was there physically. There was no hiding it now, though. Whatever lifestyle Clarisse was trying to shield in darkness had come roaring into the light. And as Eldridge Scott dialed Ramirez, hoping that the detective could tell him something about the sweet little girl he once knew, he couldn’t help wondering how it all started, and how it was going to end.
Chapter 14
C
larisse sat on the bed and thought of how similar Pookie’s story was to her own. The way she had started off in control of everything in her life, and the way she had watched it all unravel until her life was as thin as the clouds of white smoke that had ruined it all. The way she had put all her faith in men, and then in crack, and then in nothing, until all that remained of her spirit was a shadow of what had once been a tower of strength.
She thought about how Pookie was exactly like her. And then she looked at what Pookie had become. She dared not ask herself how long it would take her to end up the same way. Just thinking about it was frightening.
She was trying to avoid that thought when she felt the bed start to shake, as if something were trying to wriggle out from beneath the covers. The motion tore her from her private thoughts and when she looked around, she realized that what she felt was Pookie, still sitting next to her, wrapped in an eerie silence. She was trembling.
Hesitantly, Clarisse wrapped her arm around Pookie and began to rock her back and forth. And with that small gesture, the two of them seemed to become friends. No, they seemed to become sisters.
Black watched them, and the resemblance between them was striking. It was more than their outward appearance. The similarity burrowed down into their very souls—to that place inside where spirits are born.
That’s when it came to him. He knew how they were going to get out of there. It was risky, but then so was staying there, waiting like sitting ducks for the police to burst into the room and kill them all. Of course, their capture probably wouldn’t be half as dramatic as all that. Black figured that the only one who could’ve gotten a good look at any of them was the desk clerk. And odds were, he had finished his shift, gone home to sleep, and wouldn’t wake up until well into the afternoon. By the time he realized that he had checked the most-wanted people in Philadelphia into the hotel, they’d be long gone.
“Pookie,” Black said. “I need you to do somethin’ for me.”
Pookie ignored him and snuggled closer to Clarisse.
“Patricia,” he said. “Or whatever your name is.”
“You ain’t been callin’ me Patricia, so don’t start now,” Pookie said without looking up.
“Oh, but it’s all right for Clarisse to call you Patricia?” he said, his voice laced with irritation.
“Why can’t you just respect that she doesn’t want you to call her Patricia?” Clarisse said. “Why does everything always have to be a constant battle with you?”
“Look, I can respect all that, but—”
“No, you know what I think your problem is?” Clarisse said. “I think you just don’t have any respect for women. I think you look at every woman as a bitch or a ho, something to have, to possess, like . . . like a toy or something.”
Black hoped his face didn’t betray what he thought. He hoped that he was standing there wearing the same expression he’d worn every day for the last six months, ever since the day he’d walked away from his life. He hoped that the contempt he felt for Clarisse didn’t show through, as he wondered how she could possibly try to pass judgment on him. And then, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he heard a small voice tell him that she was right.
She’d said it so calmly, in a voice that was like a lullaby. And she’d said it in a way that left little room for question. She’d said, in so many words, that he hated all women; hated them for not being the woman he’d left behind, and for being the woman he’d left behind, and for being—period. He hated them and he hated himself for hating them, and for loving them, and for wanting them, and for needing them.
So he told himself that they were nothing. And he told himself that he would never let them hurt him again. Perhaps that’s why he could never let them be important to him. And it was obviously apparent to Clarisse. Because she had looked right through him and seen it.
“Don’t stand there and act like you don’t hear me, Everett,” Clarisse said, stirring him from his reverie.
Black gave her a blank stare in response.
“You’re just like the rest of them,” she said.
“Just like the rest of who?”
“Just like every man I know,” Clarisse said, looking at Pookie, who was asleep in her lap. “You feel threatened by women. You know you can’t control us because we don’t need you. And to tell you the truth, you probably wouldn’t know how to bring home the bacon if somebody sliced it up and put it in a bag for you. So you try to make us into nothing. You try to tell us we’re nobody. You try to act like we can’t make it without you, when you know for a fact that you can’t make it without us.
“And then you want us to respect you,” she said, spitting the words as if they left a foul taste in her mouth. “Respect you for what? You don’t even respect yourself. If you respected yourself, if you respected anybody, you wouldn’t be out here doin’ what you’re doin’.”
“Oh, so you better than me?” Black said, becoming angry. “You don’t need no man and you don’t need nobody to help you do nothin’, right? All you need is that pipe to make it all right, huh, Clarisse?
“Well, dig this here. It ain’t all right. ’Cause you know what’s gon’ happen if you keep smokin’ that dope? After a while you gon’ run outta caps, and the only thing you gon’ have left to put in that straight shooter is your life. And once you put that in there, everything goes up in smoke and disappears. Just like it was never there.”
Clarisse looked down at Pookie and continued to rock back and forth as if she couldn’t hear him. But he knew she could, so he went on.
“If you wanna blame men for everything that ever went wrong in your life, that’s on you. But I think you need to look at yourself, too. ’Cause you got yourself out here smokin’. Not me. I ain’t do nothin’ to you.”
She looked up with rage and hurt pouring from her eyes. “You call getting me mixed up in a murder nothing? You call holding me here against my will nothing?”
“Look . . . ,” Black said.
“No, you look. I’m tired of people screwing me around and then telling me it’s nothing. Do you know what that feels like, Everett?”
Clarisse got up, carefully moving Pookie’s head from her lap to the bed. Black moved from his spot by the window and sat on the desk, but said nothing.
“Can you answer me, Everett?”
He didn’t respond.
“Oh yeah,” she said, making the words sound like something slimy. “You can’t answer anything like that, because somebody might find out you actually have feelings, right? No, don’t tell me. You really don’t have feelings. Feelings are for suckers, right? In the place where everybody else has feelings, you have nothing.”
She swept one hand through the air and placed the other hand on her hip in an utterly female gesture.
“Well, I’m tired of nothing, Everett. I’m tired of people offering me the moon and stars and leaving me with nothing. I’m tired of looking at men like they’re the knights in shining armor Mommy told me about and then finding out that they’re nothing. I’m tired of waiting for something and then finding out that it’s nothing. I’m just tired.”
“Well, shut up, then,” Leroy said from the seat in the corner that he hadn’t left for the last hour. “I ain’t tryin’ to hear that
One Life to Live
shit anyway.”
Clarisse looked over at him and twisted her lips into a look of disgust.
“I just want to leave here,” she said. “It’s not fun anymore.”
Black looked her in the eye and asked a question that he had always contemplated, but never answered.
“When was it ever fun?”
Clarisse couldn’t think back that far, so she changed the subject.
“You know what the strangest part of all this is for me?” she said. “The strangest part is knowing that nobody’s going to miss me anyway. I mean, I’m a private-duty nurse, and I was just going to start with a new patient today. So it’s not like I have a supervisor or coworkers who’ll be like, ‘Where’s Clarisse?’
“I don’t have any friends. So nobody’s going to wonder why I didn’t show up for lunch or dinner tonight. I don’t have any family. Not unless you count Mr. and Mrs. Scott, the people next door.”
Clarisse stopped, like something had just struck her. “Come to think of it, they’re probably the ones who told the police about my car.”
She paused again.
“They might have even seen us leave,” she said, her face a portrait of anxiety.
Leroy smiled a mirthless grin and said, “Or maybe they just two old nosy-ass niggers that’s all up in your business like that.”
“You know what?” Clarisse said. “Why can’t you just have a little bit of respect for somebody? Damn! Those people have never done anything to you.”
“Why should I respect them?” Leroy said, as if the idea of respecting his elders were impossibly far-fetched. “What they ever done for me? I ain’t never seen none o’ the old people in my family come around and do nothin’ for me, let alone say, ‘Here, Leroy, here go a toy for Christmas,’ or, ‘Here, Leroy, this how you throw a baseball.’ You know what I got from old people when I was comin’ up? I got my ass beat. I got my arm twisted. I got my head smacked. I got told I wasn’t gon’ be shit so many times I started believin’ it myself. That’s what old people did for me.”
“Well,” Clarisse said, building a head of steam, “those same old people marched the soles off their shoes so you could have a voice, and got sprayed with fire hoses so you could walk with your head up.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to hear that old ‘We Shall Overcome’ bullshit, either,” Leroy said. “That was thirty years ago. What they doin’ now?”
“They’re waiting for you to stop trying to blame your problems on people whose only crime was loving you before there even was a you.”
“Whatever,” Leroy said, pulling out his straight shooter and dumping a cap inside.
He pulled two matches from a matchbook and lit the crack, the hiss and sizzle of the rocks echoing across the room like so many dreams exhaling for the last time.
“So that’s the answer to everything, right, Leroy?” Clarisse said. “Is that supposed to make everything go away?”
Leroy exhaled slowly through his nostrils.
“Bitch,” he said, his jaw moving side to side as he forced his words out between the smoke. “You must think it’s the answer to everything, too, ’cause you smokin’ it just like I am.”
Clarisse fell silent as her thoughts traveled backward.
“I used to think it was the answer to everything,” she said. “I guess I still do. Especially when those lonely nights roll around, when I’m sitting there wondering what happened to my life.”
She walked across the room and sat on the floor next to Leroy, looking toward the ceiling as if she could find the answers there.
“I guess that’s when I want to take a blast and just . . .” Clarisse leaned against the wall, looking wistfully at the ceiling as she drew little shapes in the air. “Just float up to nowhere and wonder if I’ll ever come back down.”
Black watched her and thought of what a waste it was to chase after the cloud. Clarisse, he knew, realized that it was a waste, too. But she would keep chasing it anyway, like a dog that runs in circles, chasing its tail. And perhaps she would eventually catch it, even if catching it meant spending the rest of her life nursing the wounds.
Black looked at her and imagined the cost of it all. He imagined it and a sadness fell over him, the kind of sadness that comes with watching a loved one hurt and knowing that only they themselves can stop the pain. His imagination was cut short by Clarisse’s, though. And his sadness was replaced by one that was infinitely deeper.
“I wonder sometimes,” Clarisse said thoughtfully. “I sit back and I wonder what would have happened if my parents would’ve lived. I mean, I’ve seen all the psychiatrists on the talk shows, and they always try to make you believe that everything that happens to you when you grow up is your parents’ fault. I used to believe that, too. Maybe that’s why I hated my parents for so long after they died.
“But I don’t believe it anymore. Now I just think your parents do the best they can, and then you make your own choices after that.”
“So why did you hate them in the first place?” Black said, realizing that he was the only one listening to her.
“I hated them because they died,” she said. “To me, when they died it was like they’d abandoned me.”
She chuckled at the absurdity of her reasoning.
“Can you imagine that? Can you imagine hating someone because they die? Like it’s their fault they got killed in a car accident, right? Or like it’s their fault that the only thing they had to leave me was a little bit of money and a house. Like it’s their fault I didn’t have any other family to take care of me except the two old people who lived next door.
“But you know what?” she said haltingly. “I hated them anyway. And I guess I hated them for so long that I started hating myself, if that makes any sense. It’s like, when you start to hate yourself, you do stupid things. You put yourself through things that you wouldn’t put yourself through if you cared anything about yourself. You let people walk all over you because you think you’re not worth anything anyway. You know what I mean?”
Black knew exactly what she meant. He had been hating himself for a lifetime, walking through a haze of feelings that he didn’t know he had and trying to find a way out of the cloud, only to end up trapped inside.
“That’s why I don’t have any friends now,” Clarisse said, shaking him from his thoughts. “Because I’m afraid to allow anyone into my life again.”
She looked up at the ceiling again, but this time there was no fantasy in her eyes. There was only hurt.
“Every time I let someone in,” she said, pausing to look away from him, “they either abandon me, like my parents did when they died, or they hurt me so bad I wish they would just leave.
“Like the last man I was seeing. The one whose clothes were in my closet.”
Clarisse sighed and shook her head, as if even the memory were too much to bear.
“He was a doctor over at Jefferson when I worked there,” she said, looking at her hands. “Dr. Carl Bancroft was one of the few young black doctors I’d ever met. It wasn’t like he was so fine or anything like that. But with me just graduating nursing school and him doing his residency over at Jefferson, we were naturally attracted to each other, I guess. I think it was more fear and nerves at being two of the few young blacks on the job than a sexual attraction. But eventually, it turned into more than that. I thought we might even end up getting married.”