“Here’s the fare,” Leroy said, boarding the bus and handing the driver a fifty.
The driver looked at it, pocketed the money as if that sort of thing happened every day, and spoke into the microphone. “Erie next.”
“I might want you to stop before we get to Erie,” Leroy said. “I know it’s against the rules and everything, but I’m lookin’ for somebody, and he probably on one of these corners you pass on your way to Erie.”
“Whatever you say, brother,” the driver said, suddenly affable.
Leroy looked over at the corner of Broad and Jerome streets, hoping he would recognize one of the shadowy figures beneath the trees that lined the opposite side of the street. It was only the drug dealers, though, and a trick who waved at Leroy as he glanced out the window over the driver’s shoulder.
At Lycoming Street, Leroy started to think of what he would do when he got to Erie Avenue. The police, he thought, would probably board the bus there, if not before, and he could only hope that no one would know that he had been in the house when the Puerto Rican was murdered. He was about to tell the driver to stop at Pike Street, when he glanced over the driver’s shoulder and saw a figure turn the corner of Broad and Dell near the auto-parts place.
“Stop,” Leroy said calmly.
“Right here?” the driver said as he slowed the bus and reached for the button to open the doors.
“Yeah, nigger, right here!” Leroy said, losing all pretense of politeness.
The driver opened his mouth as if to say something, but thought better of it and opened the doors without so much as a whisper.
When he and Pookie got off the bus, Leroy began to call out before the bus had even passed him, and the loud rumble of the engine muffled his voice.
“Black!” a voice called out as the bus on the other side of Broad Street pulled away, and Black knew before he even looked that it was Leroy.
Leroy called again, and Black stopped and turned.
When the bus passed and he saw the look on Leroy’s and Pookie’s faces, Black was reasonably certain of two things. Whatever had happened in the house wasn’t over. And he was about to become a part of it.
Inside the house, detectives took measurements, fingerprints, and photographs. Lab technicians took blood samples from the floor and semen samples from the mattresses in the upstairs bedrooms. Uniformed officers stood guard at the front and back doors, keeping nonexistent onlookers outside the perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape on what had turned out to be an easy detail—so far.
Homicide lieutenant Jorge Ramirez, who had been busy organizing and overseeing the frenzy of activity, came back into the house for what seemed like the hundredth time and asked to speak with the 25th District four-to-midnight supervisor.
“That’d be me,” Lieutenant John Flynn said as he strode from the living room to meet Ramirez.
“Okay, so what’s up?” Ramirez asked.
“Well, the victim is a city councilman,” Flynn said. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s the head of the Police Civilian Review Board.”
“I know,” Ramirez said. “What I meant was—”
“And get this,” Flynn added, rolling his eyes in the air. “He’s a spick, to boot. The papers will have a field day with this one.”
Flynn expected Ramirez to agree. After all, he looked Caucasian. With his dirty-blond hair and light brown eyes, it was a natural assumption. But a closer look revealed a dark, almost ruddy complexion and full, voluptuous lips. He could have been of Mediterranean descent, or he could have been Latino. As Ramirez looked at Flynn, unshaken by the overt racism that he’d always found to be present within the department, he realized that Flynn was trying to figure out which one he was.
“I forgot to introduce myself,” Ramirez said. “I’m Lieutenant Jorge Ramirez, Homicide. And when I said, ‘What’s up?’ I was referring to stuff like: Did your officers question any witnesses? Has any weapon been recovered? Have any suspects been identified? You know, police stuff.
“The political and racial overtones do not concern me,” Ramirez added, looking Flynn straight in the eye. “I’d just like to know if anybody under your command has done anything other than roll out the yellow tape.”
Flynn was flustered for a moment, but recovered quickly.
“No offense, Ramirez. But you know how you people get when something happens to a Latino. I was just saying that—”
“Well, well, well. If it ain’t the Red Man himself!” Ramirez said, interrupting Flynn when he saw another detective from his squad. “Come to show us rookies how it’s done?”
Detective Reds Hillman bristled at the reference to his age. Although Ramirez outranked him, no one could touch Hillman’s experience. He had worked Homicide for almost twenty years and had seen a little bit of everything. In less than a year, he would retire. He’d promised himself that he would take it easy for the next few months, and no one was going to deny him that. Not even Ramirez.
“Give a kid a lieutenant’s bar and he thinks he can start giving lip to his elders,” Hillman said.
“You know I’m just messing with you, Reds,” Ramirez said. “You don’t write, you don’t call. I was beginning to think you had something against your coworkers.”
“Work, Ramirez. I’m a prisoner of my work,” Hillman said, shaking his head in mock exhaustion. “You know how it is.”
Ramirez didn’t respond. He knew that Hillman was a prisoner. But he knew that he wasn’t imprisoned by work. The walls to Hillman’s prison were thicker than work. They were so impregnable that no one had gotten in for years. Mostly, people had stopped trying.
Sensing Ramirez’s discomfort, Hillman changed the subject. “Speaking of work, how’d that Faison case ever turn out?”
“Conviction, felony murder, life without parole,” Ramirez said. “The jury wouldn’t go for the death penalty.”
“Can’t win ’em all.”
“No kidding,” Ramirez said wistfully. “So what’ve we got on this one?”
“Well, I’ve only been here for about fifteen minutes. From what I can gather, we haven’t got any eyewitnesses, naturally, but we’ve got a list from Radio of the addresses where the calls came from. I wanted to save them for you, but I figured I’d be nice and call ’em back for you, since us little guys end up doing all the legwork anyway.”
“Aren’t you just the sweetest thing,” Ramirez said, batting his eyes and blowing a kiss at Hillman.
Hillman ventured a sidelong glance at Ramirez, then looked at an investigator from the medical examiner’s office and a crime-lab technician to make sure they hadn’t seen Ramirez’s little display.
“You’re just a barrel of laughs tonight,” Hillman said. “Marriage must be doing wonders for you.”
Ramirez just smiled. He had been married for a year, and his wife had just had a baby boy a month before. His family and his career were everything to him, and it showed.
“Anyway,” Hillman said, “the lady that lives two doors down—a Mrs. Green—says she heard a guy say, ‘Yo, it’s Leroy,’ about five seconds before the gunshots.”
Ramirez jotted down the name Leroy.
“Guess how long it takes to walk from the shed kitchen to here,” Hillman said.
“Five seconds,” Ramirez said. Then, almost as an afterthought, “So who’s Leroy, a dealer?”
“Nope, he’s a piper. Name’s Leroy Johnson. Does cars, burglaries, never anything violent. Never even had a gun charge. That’s why it doesn’t figure that he’d do this.”
“Maybe he got sick of fifty- and sixty-dollar hits,” Ramirez said.
“Maybe he didn’t do it.”
“He’s got a sheet, right?”
“Yeah, but there’s a lot more to him than the sheet,” Hillman said.
“Whatever. Let’s get a general radio message out on Leroy, and any of his known associates who frequent this house.”
“Done. I’ll pay Mrs. Green a visit, too. And here’s the list of the others who called.”
Hillman handed over a list of names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
“Let’s get the first wagon that comes in service to round up the girls on Old York Road,” Ramirez said, looking over the list. “They probably know ten times more about this than we ever will.”
“Good idea. If you want, I’ll get a couple of guys to round up the dealers. Tell them a city councilman’s been killed, start talking lethal injection. Somebody’s bound to talk.”
“How many dealers are we talking about here?” Ramirez said.
“Let’s see,” Hillman said, pausing to count on his fingers. “There’s the guy on Butler Street and the guy on Broad Street, Tone and Pop Squaly. Then there’s the girl up on Pike Street, Donna, the one that sells from the house.”
“Damn, you know this neighborhood like the back of your hand, don’t you, old man?”
“It’s called experience.”
“You gonna be able to get warrants for all of them?” Ramirez asked.
“For a city councilman? For this guy, I could get a quickie warrant to extradite the pope from Rome.”
“Somehow, I still think our best chance is this Leroy guy,” Ramirez said. “He was just too close not to have anything to do with it.”
“Okay, you’ve got a point. But I know Leroy. I’ve watched him walk these streets for a long time. If it wasn’t for crack, he’d probably be in business somewhere, doing something legitimate. He’s got a head on his shoulders. I don’t know too much about Black—the kid he hangs out with. But I hear he’s pretty smart, too.”
“Did you get Black on the GRM?” Ramirez said.
“Yeah, I got him on the GRM. Problem is, they didn’t do it.”
“Maybe not,” Ramirez said. “But if Leroy and Black didn’t do this thing, they damn sure know who did. And they’re going to have to tell me something, because somebody’s gotta take the fall for this one.”
Chapter 4
“W
ussup with you, man?” Black asked as Leroy finished limping across Broad Street with Pookie in tow. “And why you rollin’ with her?”
“I ain’t got time to explain, Black, but you know I’ll break you off a little somethin’ later on,” Leroy said. “We just need someplace to chill for a little bit.”
Black glanced at an uncharacteristically silent Pookie, who was wearing a fearful expression he’d never seen on her face, and then at Leroy, whose eyes were filled with a desperation that didn’t quite fit him. For a second, he thought of leaving them, of walking away from whatever trouble they had fallen into. But they seemed to be reading his thoughts. Just as he thought of leaving, the fear and desperation he’d seen in their eyes seemed to turn to outright terror.
“All right,” he said, hoping that whatever it was wasn’t as serious as it looked. “Come on.”
Beckoning for them to follow, Black walked down Dell Street, a block that runs diagonally from McFerran to Broad. He tried not to look at the two or three parked cars on the opposite side of the street, but he couldn’t help noticing that the passengers’ heads in two of the cars were bobbing up and down—somebody was getting what they had paid for. When he passed the third car, watching crack smoke steam its windows and praying that the police car he’d just seen wouldn’t circle back around, he stopped and rang the bell on a well-maintained two-story brick row house.
“Who is it?” a high-pitched female voice called out from behind the barred first-floor windows.
“Everett,” he said.
“Just a minute,” came the answer, followed by the soft padding of feet approaching the door.
“Don’t say nothin’,” Black said to Leroy and Pookie, just as his old classmate Clarisse Williams started to unlock the door.
“Hey, Ever . . .”
A smile quickly faded from her lips as she opened the door and saw three of them standing at her front door.
“I told you never to bring anyone to my home, Everett,” she said, her eyes darting quickly to her left and then to her right, trying to see if her neighbors were looking out their windows.
Clarisse was so afraid that someone would learn that she, a registered nurse, was smoking crack, she just knew the world could see her every time she got ready to take a blast. She was, after all, the type of woman people watched. She was all soft curves and luminous chocolate-brown skin, with full lips and a rounded nose set beneath eyes that slanted over high cheekbones. Yet her beauty was overlapped with something else—a simmering attitude that gave hard edges to the curves and a dark tint to her chocolate glow.
“Good night, Everett,” Clarisse said, trying to hide her paranoia behind a stern mask that was meant to tell Black that he was no longer welcome in her home.
But as she began to close the door, she took on a look that seemed to depict a struggle between two separate people— the one who was a principled, respectable, professional young woman, and the one who was smoking the pipe.
“I’ll give you a bundle,” Black said, reading her expression and taking a chance that the crack fiend would win the struggle.
The door stopped in midswing.
“A bundle?” she said.
He nodded.
Clarisse looked at Leroy and Pookie again, hesitated, then opened the door wide, motioning for them to go back to the dining room.
“Thank you,” Leroy said, and limped through the living room, looking at the gray three-piece leather living room set and the big-screen television that sank down into thick burgundy pile carpeting.
“Thank you,” Pookie said, her normally brash and arrogant voice barely audible as she tagged behind Leroy.
As Black tried to come in, Clarisse stopped him at the door and held out her hand. He looked at her, considered giving her half a bundle, then reached into his inside pocket and gave her one of the three and a half bundles Pop Squaly had paid him for the microwave, the drill, and the saws. As she looked to make sure there were twenty caps in the plastic baggy, she stepped aside and let him pass, closing and locking the door behind him.
“Don’t sit down!” Clarisse yelled as she turned to walk through to her dining room, still counting the caps. But it was too late. Pookie was already sitting on one of the heavily cushioned beige chairs that surrounded the rosewood dining table.
“Look, Clarisse,” Black said before she passed through the portal that led to the dining room. “We won’t be here long, I just—”
“You got that right,” she said, cutting him off and making him feel small in a way that only a sister could. “You won’t be here long. And . . .”
Her mouth dropped open as she stopped in the doorway and watched Leroy sit down, squirming in pain as he tried to adjust himself—the oil from his jeans rubbing off onto her beige chair covers.
“I know you’re not rubbing oil in my chair,” she said, and Leroy tried to jump up, but fell down when his swelled knee buckled under the full weight of his body.
Clarisse walked over to him—her scowl replaced by the concerned, gentle countenance of a nurse—and removed Leroy’s hand from his knee. With her fingertips, she touched his knee on either side. When she did, Leroy winced.
“What happened to you?” Clarisse asked as Pookie walked over to Leroy and touched his forehead with a tenderness she had never displayed before.
“It’s a long story,” he said, dumping a cap into his straight shooter and holding out his hand with his thumb and forefinger extended. “Gimme two.”
“Can’t you wait a minute?” Clarisse said. “Your knee’s as big as a basketball and you’re saying gimme two. Let me wrap it and—”
“No, I can’t wait,” Leroy said, accepting two matches from Pookie. “The way it’s goin’ tonight, this might be the only medicine I get before—”
“Before what?” Black said, trying to get Leroy to shut up before he got them kicked out of the only safe place they could be for the next few hours. “Before we go get some more dope?”
As Leroy struck the matches and held them up to the end of the metal piece of antenna that he had stashed in his sock along with the five thousand he’d taken from Podres, Black dumped two caps into one of the glass straight shooters he’d just bought and offered it to Clarisse.
She accepted it, Black handed her two matches, then dumped two more into another and lit two matches for himself. Pookie pulled out her own straight and lit up two of the caps that Rock had given her earlier, and for the next few minutes, they all pulled poison into their lungs.
Black had to force himself to sit still as he held in the smoke, because his ears began to ring. It sounded almost like sirens, and it could have been, but he had learned long ago not to let paranoia consume him or cause an outward change in his behavior. That could get you killed, he thought, as he released the smoke slowly through his nose and looked around at everyone else.
Pookie began to twitch in a way that was almost frightening as she blew out the smoke. Clarisse stood perfectly still for a moment, her eyes as big as tea saucers, then sat slowly down in the same chair Leroy had soiled just moments ago. Leroy’s jaw began to move rhythmically from side to side, and his eyes were momentarily filled with the desperation Black had seen earlier. Then he relaxed and began to look slowly around the room, fixing his gaze on Black, then on Clarisse, and finally on Pookie.
As the momentary high gave way to the almost sexual sensation that followed, each of them lost themselves in private, crack-induced thoughts amid the slowly swirling cloud of acrid smoke. In the maze of streets that surrounded them, however, the news of what had happened in the house began to spread. And the net that the world was trying to throw around them was rapidly taking shape, being transmitted over police radios even as they smoked themselves into a schizophrenic stupor.
* * *
The dispatcher on J band—the police’s main radio frequency—cursed herself for agreeing to stay over and work the four hours of overtime. As usual, they were shorthanded in the Radio Room, and she was needed. That, and the fact that she actually cared about the cops she had worked with every day for the past ten years, was what kept her going.
One of the few experienced people in Radio—a high-stress, high-turnover job—she was probably the only one the lieutenant would entrust with J band on a night when it seemed that all hell was breaking loose on the border of East and Northwest divisions. Not even one of the uniformed officers who occasionally worked the consoles could have handled the pressure of a high-speed chase across two or three divisions as well as she could, and everyone knew it. So they endured her barbs and watched her switch back and forth across the Radio Room, teasing any and every man who would dare think he could have her.
That was another thing that kept up her zeal for the job—the men. At fifty, her chances of finding another husband were slim, but if she didn’t, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying, and it wouldn’t be because she didn’t look good. With caramel skin that looked as if it would melt at the slightest touch, luxurious, thick hair cut to shoulder length, and a curvaceous figure that belied her chair-bound profession, she still attracted stares from men half her age. She was getting stares even now. But she was ignoring them. Her concern now was leaving. She’d had enough excitement for one night. With that thought in mind, she looked at her watch and immediately had a fit.
“It’s only twelve-thirty?” she said, thinking that it seemed like she’d been there forever when she’d only done a half hour extra.
Half seriously, she sucked her teeth and made an announcement, ignoring the corporal who hung over her shoulder and the static-filled chatter of the commanders and detectives who occupied J band.
“I’m tellin’ y’all, if I don’t get some coffee right now, and I mean right this minute, I’m not responsible for what happens to these idiots on my radio,” she said.
“I’m going to get us some now,” one of the cops said as he passed his headset to another officer and started toward the hallway.
“And make mine black,” she said. “You know I don’t like nothin’ too white.”
“Not even me?” the cop asked sheepishly.
“Especially not you,” she said with a devilish smile.
“Well, I guess I’ll have to hope the jeweler takes refunds on three-carat diamond engagement rings. And here it is I thought there was a chance for you and me.”
“Now, you know you ain’t thought nothin’ of the sort. You don’t make enough money to keep me like I need to be kept.”
“Not even with overtime?”
“Not with two jobs, a water ice stand, and double time on Sunday.”
The cop laughed and went out into the hallway.
One of the sergeants hung up the phone at the supervisor’s desk and ripped a sheet of paper from the printer. “We just got this GRM on the guys from the Park Avenue job.”
“Okay,” she said, taking the paper and glancing at it before broadcasting it over J, T, M, and all eight divisional bands.
“Cars stand by,” she said, pausing for a half second before reading on. “GRM 92635. Wanted for investigation for a founded shooting at 3746 Park Avenue and an assault on a police officer at the Roberts Avenue off-ramp of the northbound Schuylkill Expressway on September 24, 1992, two males. Number one, Leroy Johnson, black male, thirty-four years, has black hair and brown eyes, is five feet eleven inches tall, one hundred sixty pounds, with a scar on his right forearm and a tattoo on his chest area that reads 30
TH STREET NATION
. He is darkcomplexioned with a thin build and was last seen wearing jeans, red sneakers, and a black sweatshirt with the word fila written across the chest. He has a thin beard and mustache and speaks with a slight stutter. Number two, Samuel Everett Jackson, black male, twenty-four years, has black hair and brown eyes, is five feet ten inches tall, one hundred fifty pounds. He is darkcomplexioned with a thin build and wears a mustache and goatee. No further description. These males may have made their escape on foot from Roberts and Wayne Avenue, where they may have been involved in an auto accident at or about twelve-fifteen
A.M.
, September twenty-fifth, 1992. They should be considered armed and dangerous. Please use caution. This is KGF 587, the correct time is now 12:35
A.M.
”
When she had finished reading the GRM, the dispatcher looked puzzled.
“A general radio message fifteen minutes after the last time somebody saw them?” she said. “Excuse me, not the last time somebody saw them. The last time somebody thought they may have been involved in an auto accident.”
“Yeah, they’re really trying to move on this one,” the sergeant said.
“Yeah, I guess they are.”
They both sat quietly for a moment, listening to the static-filled transmissions on the radio.
“It’s a shame about that rookie,” the dispatcher said seriously, remembering how he’d screamed over the air just before his car ran into the median. “Have they said anything about his condition?”
“He’s over at Abbottsford Hospital with second- and third-degree burns on his arms. He’ll live. But get this. One of the suspects from the car he was chasing is in Abbottsford, too. He hasn’t regained consciousness since they brought him in, and it doesn’t look good. Apparently the guy got burned pretty bad before he managed to crawl out of the car. If he wakes up, Homicide can question him to see what he knows. If not . . .”
The sergeant let the sentence hang in midair as the dispatcher sipped at her coffee and tried to suppress a shudder at the thought of being trapped in a fiery wreck.
“In the meantime,” the sergeant said, breaking into her thoughts, “I’m getting it straight from the top that we have to read the GRM every five minutes.”
“Why’d they move so fast on the GRM, anyway? Who’d these guys kill, the president?”
“Close.” The sergeant lowered his voice to a whisper. “It was Podres.”
“Podres?” she said loudly as the sergeant put his fingers to his lips in an effort to keep her quiet. “The head of the Police Civilian Review Board?”
“Yeah,” the sergeant said, looking around the room self- consciously.
They were both quiet for a moment, probably going over the implications of a city councilman’s murder happening on their watch. Every move made by the police, including the actions taken in the Radio Room, would be under the close scrutiny of the jackal-like Philadelphia press corps.