Fanatics (13 page)

“Yes, thanks,” said Flo. “I'm trying to find out the truth about your son, Mrs. Smith. So we can arrest and convict his killer.”

“Truth?” The old woman coughed. “What's truth anyway? I never been no snitch for cops. But after this, you want truth? I'll show you truth. Most people run from truth like Dracula from a holy cross. But I'm gonna roll you some clean dice right now, so look here. Just look at this.”

This
was a book.

The old woman reached over and plucked it from the shelf of a small bookcase next to her bed. A dog-eared paperback book,
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling.

And her tears started to flow, uncontrolled.

“You're kind, Officer, a real kind person, I can see that. You got your job, and I'm not trying to give you no hard time here. Thank you for whatever you can do. I just want you to know him exactly like I knew him.”

But for Flo nothing was as straightforward as just wanting to know him as his mother once did: the man was clearly far more complex than the boy. There were whole landscapes she wanted to explore, and Mrs. Kitty Smith might be yet another guide through the wilderness of what had been Owen Smith/Ballz Busta's life. Flo wanted his mother to talk as much as she could, and she'd listen to the old woman's stories until the shadows in her detective's mind were swept away.

She wanted confidences and understandings.

“I can just feel it,” the old woman said. “You're a mother, too, a good mother. And you've known hardness, just like me. Look at this here.” She opened the paperback book. “This was his favorite book in his first school. Holy Redeemer with the nuns. The public schools around this neighborhood were always too rough. I sent my boys to Redeemer.”

The sight of the tattered book—and the mention of a Catholic school—brought to Flo's mind her own childhood and the preferences of her parents.

The old woman opened
Kim
to the inside front cover. “You got to see this. Makes it understandable, kind of person he was, even as a boy. Doesn't it? Only ten years old.”

Inside was written, in careful script,
Duties & Work,
and below this, right to the bottom and all the way down the other side…

“Ten years old, remember. And I was out all day long, cleaning on a steady job at Chemical Bank. I always keep this near me,” Mrs. Smith said. “Reminder what Owen was like. A good set schedule, it just seems so safe, doesn't it? But look, it does make everything a lot more understandable now, right?”

“Understandable?”

“Right, growing up like that, all that discipline, starting out when you're young and when you're as smart as Owen was. No surprise he got so far in life.”

“No, no surprise.”

“Always working, never no real trouble. They could see he'd be a success, he was their smartest boy in school, in high school, too, Saint Francis Prep, he got a music scholarship and he led the school band. They wanted him to go to a seminary, become a Franciscan priest. But we really weren't no Catholics. I just wanted safe schools, not like the kind I got stuck in. I always remember the day I got put in an orphanage. ‘Here's little Kitty,' my mother said to the reverend, it was down South. Arkansas. And a tall thin man, a white man, locked his eyes on me, and a second later I was being led away, and my mother was gone, just disappeared. Poof. Vanished. I never seen her again. I was standing in a big cold room with other little colored girls, and we did exactly like we were told. ‘Take off all your clothes, girls, and set them on the floor.' Then we stood there naked and shivering, and we watched an older girl carefully lift our clothes with a pair of wood tongs and drop it all in big pots of boiling water.

“We got marched off to another room, naked, and sat on a hard bench with a sheet over our shoulders and the reverend's wife run cold steel clippers through our hair, back and forth, back and forth, till we got shaved right down to our scalps. I sat there not saying a word, watching my dark black hair, thick and curly, fall all around me. And then they led us into another big room filled with tubs of hot water and stinking of carbolic soap. Reverend's wife, she soaped me down good and long and scrubbed me toe to top…and then
he
rubbed me dry with a towel felt like sandpaper all over me. They gave us wool drawers, black socks, and a long itchy blue dress hanging down to our ankles. Then they marched us out into a yard in front of the church. ‘You're lucky little girls to be here,' the reverend says. ‘Now we're all going up into God's house, and you're going to thank Him with all your hearts for giving you so much of His kindness and blessings.' I didn't cry till I went to bed that night, and I reached up and felt my head, and it was all so naked, just completely bald. I cried and cried till I fell asleep. No, didn't want none of that when I became a momma. I wanted better, and things always get better, you know, they really do, you just have to wait and they do get better. Yes, they do. So now I got three grandchildren, yes, I have three. And I met them once by accident. Accident for them, not me. Lawrence, Henry, and Miriam. Sweethearts. I sat and sat over by the park side, just up from their big house. Montgomery Place, very,
very
fancy place, too. They're the only people of color on that block, the Smith family, I bet you my gold tooth. The kids come out with their Chinese maid or whatever she is, Juanita the kids call her. And I followed them to the Third Street playground, and I sat there. I just sat there right by the swings. They never get tired of those swings, and I watched and I watched until I couldn't take it no more. That's when I went over and started talking to them. And that's when I learned their names, my three grandchildren. Lawrence. Henry. Miriam. And she is so pretty, Miriam, she's gonna break a whole lot of hearts someday. Haven't talked to them since. But I seen them. I sit there, and I sit there when the weather's good, and I catch a glimpse of them. Claiborne never met his niece and nephews, says he don't want to neither.”

“Claiborne?” At the mention of the name, Flo tensed, stiffened like an animal shot through the spine.

“My other boy. They're twins but not identical. Maybe same height, and that's about it. Owen come out first, Claiborne come about a half hour later. Story of his life, Claiborne, a half hour later. Story of Owen's, too, always first. All hell and pepper, Owen.”

Claiborne…
From the drawer in the night table beside her bed, the old woman took out an envelope of photographs.

“Look at this,” she said. “Isn't this something?”

A faded color snapshot of two boys about thirteen years old, in their red graduation caps and gowns, one with a smile as bright as sunlight, the other a small silly grin. Flo couldn't link either boy with a mental image of mature men.

The photograph was cracked in the corners and well covered in fingerprints, the picture removed and replaced from the worn and wrinkled envelope thousands of proud and loving times. The old woman lingered over the photo, pointing out details to Flo and seeking her admiration.

“Claiborne, he got sad eyes. Like me, I guess, clear but sad. Owen had them hot double-barrel-shotgun eyes and lots of women like that, he found that out early, too. And he went right straight to work on them, like he did on his music. Never wasted a minute. But Claiborne, he takes life pretty much as it comes. You want some tea? You see a kettle and a pot in the kitchen in there, you just go in and boil up some water for tea. I could go for some more, and I'd get up and do it myself, but my knees kill me on days like this. Cold and wet. You find everything you need inside there…”

10:06 A.M.

Flo went into the kitchen, which looked out onto a backyard just as in her home.

Here the windows were barred, and the glass panes smudged with a daylong dusk.

A light above the stove illuminated a teakettle. While Flo waited for the water to boil, she stood at a window.

Claiborne…

Below the window, in the yard, were steps down to the cellar. A steel-rail fence with two rows of bars, upper and lower, enclosed the cellar entrance to prevent anyone from falling in. Her eyes surveyed the yard, more bare earth than grass, long neglected, and her focus came to rest on the cellar railing, as uncared for as the yard, the green paint chipped, exposed steel rusting, a bar missing from the upper row. The bars were about twenty inches in length, an inch or so in diameter, hexagonal in shape, and the missing bar left a gap with solder traces on the top and middle rails…

On her cell phone, Flo called detective Sergeant Marty Keane.

“I'm still at his mother's,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. “Come over now. I'll wait till you get here. There's evidence. And maybe more.”

Then she called the driver of her car, parked just down the street. “Pull up in front of the house and wait for Marty. Anyone comes to the door, stop him for questioning. He may be armed.”

And a third call, this to Frank Murphy.

“The killer is his brother or so it looks. And that guy with the picture this morning, the one who got the autograph—”

“Claiborne?”

“Right. That's what I thought I heard. He pops up again, hold him.”

Flo carried a pot of tea into Mrs. Smith's bedroom. “Your son Claiborne, what does he do?”

“Day labor, when he can get it. I help him out time to time, out of what Owen gives me. Help him out from the hush-up money.” She smiled sadly. “Ten thousand a month Owen puts in my account to live on, pay the rent here, food and stuff. If I ever speak out, if I ever even show up at their door, no more money. Yeah, that's the deal. Some deal, don't you think? And I give some to Claiborne every now and then. Sometimes he's staying here, Claiborne, he's got his own little room up front there. Sometimes he stays somewhere else, I don't know where. I haven't seen or heard from him since the bad news, and he got all broke up and just left, even though the boys went their own ways a long time ago. Before they were men, even.”

The old woman paused to blow on her hot tea, again and again, while Flo waited, impatiently, for Marty Keane to arrive.

Hovering around her detective's image of the younger twin, Claiborne Smith, was a funereal halo of waste and failure, always threatening his brother Owen's blinding success, and Flo felt sure it was the fear of catching it, that disease of failure more than anything else that long ago drove the older-by-thirty-minutes Owen into flight, and kept him there right into manhood.

“You looking for truth?” Mrs. Smith said. “I know somebody who never misses the truth. She's a champ. Mother Gloria, her name, she got offices all over the city. Maybe you call her and you go see her. She reads the spirits. Too bad she don't do house calls no more, not since she got so big. She sells lucky lottery numbers, too. She could find Owen's spirit. But I can't talk to him, I'm too scared. He became a man, and he didn't even want to look at me, his own momma, forget talking.”

The tears returned to the old woman's black-rimmed eyes, mascara streaking her rouged cheeks like war paint.

“Thanks, Mrs. Smith, thanks for the lead. I can't tell you how glad I am I came to see you.”

Flo sipped her hot tea, praying for Marty Keane to arrive soon.

And she considered the afternoon with Cecil King. She'd requested four police cruisers, two stationed at each end of the public schools' front entrances for Cecil King's arrivals and exits.

But so far she'd received no reply from the local precincts.

10:10 A.M.

Claiborne Smith often considered exactly this:

What'll life be like, when you're a man?

Shit, he didn't ever see himself sleeping in no sleaze hole squat, that's for fucking sure, a condemned building on Atlantic Avenue, boarded-up piece of crap, traffic outside never stopping.

Anyway, least the place was free.

But of course when he was a boy, Claiborne Smith dreamed about the right answers to all kinds of questions like this.

Why are you here? Why are you on this motherfucking earth?

And he had his right answers. The best. To get married. Have kids. Be a success and work for them, work for your family.

And get rich, of course.

That's why…

You want your ass out in that world. You want work. You want money. You want girls, you want women. You want to touch their underwear, stroke their soft skin, get held between their legs. In one great swoon, bury it all in a woman's body.

Just all the normal things…

And so as a boy he dreamed. Shit, yes, he fantasized. He pictured an adult life of peace and security and a woman's endless charms.

Picture her, that main woman, her name:
Wife
.

The apartment with a terrace over by Prospect Park. Like the new senator's place but even better. And she'd be waiting for him with the drinks, her black hair, maybe blond, swept back, her laughter carefree, kids playing on the terrace—no, finishing up homework at their desks.
You lift up the kids…
and you kiss the kids and you kiss her deeply, your great love, your wife, secrets in your eyes. Summer weekends at your house on a beach, tossing a ball around, bodies like young gods. Bentley in the garage. No, two Bentleys, his and hers. Long nights together, loving so gently it lasts for hours…
I love you, baby, we'll always be happy
. Christmas feasting, New Year's partying, rejoicing. That dazzle of winter morning sunlight pouring in from the snow-covered terrace, and from the radio all the good old corny stuff…