Double Deuce (9 page)

I got a pork tenderloin out and brushed it with honey and sprinkled it with rosemary and put it in the oven. While it roasted I mixed up some corn flour biscuits and let them sit while I tossed a salad of white beans and peppers and doused it with some olive oil and cilantro. When the pork was done I took it out and let it rest while I baked the biscuits. I put some boysenberry jam out to have with the biscuits and sat down to eat.

I had already put away a biscuit when Susan hung up the phone and walked across the kitchen and gave me a kiss. She pursed her lips slightly and then nodded.

“Boysenberry,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“We got it last fall at that stand in Belfast, Maine.”

“Sensitive palate and good memory,” I said.

“And great kisser?”

“Everyone says so,” I said. “You want a little supper?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“I’ll have something later,” she said. “I still have to go to the club.”

“Aerobics?”

“Yes. I’m taking a step class and then I’ll probably do some weights. You eat much too early for me.”

I nodded.

“Any progress today?” Susan said.

“Some,” I said. “We got the name of Devona’s boyfriend.”

“Can you find him?” Susan said.

“He can run,” I said. “But he can’t hide.”

“Isn’t that a sports saying of some sort?”

“Yeah. Joe Louis said it about Billy Conn.”

“Do you think he had to do with killing her?”

“We find him,” I said, “we’ll ask.”

Susan nodded. She looked at my supper. “That looks good,” she said. “Well, I’ve got to get moving. I still have my revolting workout.”

“I know this is silly,” I said, “but if you find it revolting, why do you do it?”

“That’s silly,” Susan said.

“I knew it was when I said it. Well, it’s working great, anyway.”

“Thank you,” she said and hurried off to change.

As I ate my supper with the first round of the playoffs on the tube, I thought about how I had almost never seen Susan when she wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t mind it exactly, but I had noticed it less when we lived apart.

“I thought posses were Jamaican,” I said.

“Language changes very fast here. Now it just means a small gang. There are gangs with five or six kids in them if that’s all there are in the neighborhood,” Erin said.

We turned onto McCrory Street, a block from Double Deuce, and left onto Dillard Street and pulled up into the apron of an abandoned gas station. The pumps were gone, and the place where they had been torn out of the island looked like an open wound. The station windows had been replaced with plywood; and the plywood, and the walls of the station itself, were covered completely with fluorescent graffiti. The overhead door to the service bay was up and half a dozen kids sat in the bay on recycled furniture and looked at the rain. There was a thunderous rap group on at peak volume, and the kids were passing around a jug of white Concord grape wine.

“The one with the wispy goatee is Tallboy,” Erin said.

He was sprawled on a broken chaise lounge: plumpish, and not very tall, wearing a red sweatshirt with the hood up.

“Tallboy?” I said.

“He usually drinks beer in the twenty-four-ounce cans,” Erin said. She rolled down the window and called to him.

“Tallboy, I need to talk with you.”

“Who you with, Miss Macklin?” Tallboy said.

He hadn’t moved but he’d tightened up. All of them had, and they gazed out at me in dark silence from their cave.

“A friend,” she said. “I need to talk. Can you come sit in the car?”

Tallboy got up slowly and came even more slowly toward the car. He walked with a kind of wide-legged swagger. He might have been a little drunk. When he was in the back he left the door open.

“What you need, Miss Macklin?”

“You knew Devona Jefferson,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I know you did, Tallboy. She was your girlfriend.”

“So?”

“And she was killed.”

“Don’t know nothing about that,” he said. He looked hard at me. “Who you?” he said.

“Guy looking for the people killed your girlfriend.”

“You DT?”

“No.”

“So what you care who piped Devona?”

“They killed your baby, too,” I said.

“Hey, man, what you talking shit to me for? You don’t even know that my little girl.”

I waited. Tallboy glanced back toward the open garage where the jug was.

“She prob’ly was,” he said. “She look like me.”

He looked back toward the wine again. I reached under the front seat and brought out a bottle of Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. It’s handy to have around, because there are times when it is a better bribe than money.

“Try a little of this,” I said.

Tallboy stared at it and then took the bottle and swallowed some.

“Damn,” he said, “that is some juke, man. That is some bad beverage.”

“You know who killed her?” I said.

His eyes slid away from mine and he took another pull on the Glenfiddich. Then he looked back at me and his eyes were tearing. He was drunker than I thought and the scotch was moving him along.

“Sure you do. But you don’t care. You want them to get away with it.”

He shifted his gaze to Erin. “That ain’t so, Miss Macklin.”

“I know,” she said. “I know you don’t want them to get away with it.” She put her hand over the back of the seat and he took it and she held his hand. The tears were running down his face now. I was quiet. We waited. He drank again.

“Nine my fucking baby,” he said. “Motherfuckers.”

“Who?” Erin said.

“Motherfucking Hobarts.” He was mumbling. I had to listen hard. “Dealing some classic for them and I a little short, I gonna pay them. I just a little short that minute. And motherfuckers nine my little girl.”

“You sure?” I said.

“Who else it gonna be?” Tallboy said.

“You know which Hobart?” I said.

He shook his head.

“It ain’t over,” he said. “We gon take care of business. Can’t fuck with us and ride.” His head had sunk to his chest. He was talking into the bottle… and out of it. “Can’t dis a Dillard and ride, man.”

I looked at Erin and gestured with my head. “Thank you, Tallboy,” she said. “You know how to call me up, don’t you?”

Tallboy nodded.

“If you want to talk about this any more, you call me,” she said.

“Yass, Miss Macklin.”

Tallboy lurched out of the car holding the bottle of Glenfiddich. He held it up in one hand and waved it at the rest of the posse.

“Fine,” he said and started to say something else, and didn’t seem able to and lurched on into the garage, out of the rain.

I slid the car into gear and pulled away. “He isn’t even tough,” I said.

“Of course he isn’t,” Erin said. “He tries, but he’s not.”

“Tough is the only way to survive in here,” I said.

“I know,” Erin said. “Some of them are tougher than one would think possible… and some of them aren’t.”

“Say the Hobarts did it is saying Major did it,” Hawk said.

“If Tallboy’s right,” I said.

“Tallboy will never testify,” Erin said.

“No need,” Hawk said.

“Spenser said something like that,” Erin said. “I asked him if he might take action of his own. He said he might.”

Hawk smiled. He drank some whiskey. And rolled it a little on his tongue and swallowed. Then he stood and went to the sink in the corner and added a little tap water. He stood while he sampled it, nodded to himself, and came back to his chair.

Erin said, “What would you consider appropriate action?”

“We could kill him,” Hawk said. Erin looked at me.

“You?” she said.

“Somebody is going to,” I said.

“I don’t think you would,” she said, “simply execute him yourself.”

I let that slide. There was nothing there for me. She looked back at Hawk.

“You feel no sympathy for these kids, do you,” she said.

Hawk looked friendly but puzzled.

“Got nothing to do with sympathy,” Hawk said. “Got to do with work. Work I do you kill people sometimes. Major seems as good a person to kill as anybody.”

“When you were twenty,” Erin said, “you probably weren’t so different from Major.”

“Am now,” Hawk said. He drank another swallow of whiskey.

Erin was holding her whiskey glass in both hands. She stared into it quietly for a moment.

“You got out,” she said. “You were no better off than Major, probably, and you got out.”

Hawk looked at her pleasantly.

“Now you are a free man,” Erin said. “Autonomous, sure of yourself, unashamed, unafraid. Nobody’s nigger.”

Hawk listened politely. He seemed interested. “And you’ve paid a terrible price,” she said.

“Worth the cost,” Hawk said.

“I know what you’re like,” she said. “I see young men who, were they stronger, or braver, or smarter, would grow up to be like you. Young men who have put away feelings. Who make a kind of Thoreauvian virtue out of stripping their emotional lives to the necessities.”

“Probably seem a good idea at the time,” Hawk said.

“Of course it does,” Erin said. “It is probably what they must do to live. But what a tragedy, to put aside, in order to live, the things that make it worth anything to live.”

“Worse,” Hawk said, “if you do that and don’t live anyway.”

“Yes,” Erin said.

We all sat for a while nursing the whiskey, listening to the damp traffic sounds from Berkeley Street, where it crosses Boylston. Erin was still staring down into her glass. When she raised her head, I could see that her eyes were moist.

“It’s not just Major that you mourn for,” I said.

She shook her head silently.

“If Hawk talked about things like this, which he doesn’t, he might say that you misread him. That what you see as the absence of emotion is something rather more like calm.”

“Calm?” I nodded.

“I worse than Major,” Hawk said quietly. “And I got better, and I got out, and I got out by myself.”

“And that makes you calm?”

“I know I can trust me,” Hawk said.

“And you’d kill Major?”

“Don’t know if I will, know I could.”

“And you wouldn’t mind,” Erin said. “I can’t understand that.”

Erin’s glance rested on Hawk. She wasn’t staring at her whiskey now.

“I can’t understand that.”

“I know,” Hawk said.

“I don’t want to understand that,” Erin said.

“I know that too,” Hawk said.

“Know him?” Hawk said.

“Name was Tallboy,” I said. “He was Devona Jefferson’s boyfriend and maybe the baby’s father.”

“You just talked to him.”

“Yeah.”

“So he here for us.”

“Yeah.”

Hawk nodded. He looked slowly around the project. Nothing moved. He looked back down at Tallboy.

“Don’t seem too tall,” he said.

“He liked the big beer cans,” I said.

Hawk nodded some more, still looking almost absently at the boy’s body. His clothes were wet, which meant he’d been left here while it was still raining. There was a dark patch of blood on the front of his sweatshirt, in the middle of his chest.

“Ain’t no trash can fire,” Hawk said.

He was surveying the project again.

“He told me he was going to even up for his girlfriend,” I said. “He was drunk.”

“Probably drunk when he tried,” Hawk said, his eyes moving carefully over the silent buildings.

“Figure they’re watching from somewhere?” I said.

“They kids,” Hawk said. “They got to be watching, see what we do.”

I was still looking at Tallboy. I didn’t bother looking for the gang. If they were there, Hawk would see them. Tallboy appeared to be maybe sixteen in death’s frozen repose. Soft faced, not mean. Kind of kid would probably really rather have stayed home and talked with his mother and his aunts, if he’d had any, and they were sober, and their boyfriends wouldn’t slap him around. Might have not gotten killed if I hadn’t gone and talked with him and gotten him stirred up about who killed his girlfriend and her baby, that might have been his baby. He probably liked the baby, not like a father; not to change diapers, and earn money, and take care of-that would have been beyond him. But she’d have been fun to hug, and she’d have been cute, and he would probably have liked it when the three of them were alone and they could play together. It had started to rain again, not much, a light drizzle that beaded sparsely on his upturned defenseless face.

Hawk said, “Third building from the right, second floor, three middle windows.”

I glanced up slowly, and not toward the windows. I glanced obliquely past them and looked out of the corner of my eye. There was a shade half drawn and some movement behind it.

“What makes you think it’s them?” I said.

“Been here every day,” Hawk said. “While you and the schoolteacher dashing around the ghetto. Nobody live on that floor.”

“Well, maybe some evasive action and come up behind them?” I said.

“Sure,” Hawk said. “Little acting, too.” He gestured suddenly at the vacant lot across the street. I whirled to look where he pointed.

“Now we hustle into the car,” Hawk said. And we did, and pulled out of the quadrangle with Hawk’s tires screaming as they spun on the wet pavement. We went around the corner onto McCrory Street and slammed into the alley back of the third building. Hawk popped the trunk and we each grabbed a shotgun. As we moved toward the back door of the building each of us pumped a shell into the chamber at the same moment.

“We could set this to music,” I said.

The back entryway had been padlocked, but the hasp had been jimmied loose and it hung, with its still intact padlock attached, limply beside the partly open door. We went in, I to the right, Hawk to the left. We were in a dim cellar. It was full of cardboard boxes which had gotten wet and collapsed, spilling whatever had once been in them onto the floor, where whatever soaked the boxes had, over time, reduced it to an indeterminute mass of mildewing stuff. In the middle of the cellar was a defunct boiler with rust staining the sides of it and adding to the indiscernible detritus on the floor.

We moved past the boiler to the stairs. Hawk, in hightop Reebok pump-ups, moved through the trash beneath the building like a dark ghost, holding the eight-pound shotgun in his right hand as if it were a wand. It was as if he were floating. We went up the two flights of stairs without a sound. In the dim, claustrophobic corridor we paused, Hawk counting the doors until he found what we wanted. He stepped to it and put his ear against it and listened. There was litter nearly ankle deep in places all up and down the corridor-broken glass, fast-food paper and plastic, beer cans, and food scraps that were no longer identifiable. In the silence while Hawk listened I could hear vermin rustle in the trash. I waited. Hawk listened. Then he smiled at me and nodded.

With the shotgun in my right hand I reached over with my left and took hold of the knob and turned it slowly. It gave and the door opened inward and Hawk went in and left. I came in behind him and moved right. There were eight kids in there grouped near the windows, wondering where we were. Beside the window was a large cable spool, standing on end. On top of it lay a Tec-9 automatic which would fire thirty-two rounds if we let it.

One kid spun toward the gun. It was the same small, quick one I’d taken the Browning from in the van. I fired at the cable spool and hit it, chips of plastic flew off the handle of the Tec-9, and a ragged chunk of the wooden top flew up as well. The handgun ricocheted off the wall and bounced on the floor, the clip separated and skittered across the room, some of the shotgun pellets pocked the wall beyond.

Everyone froze.

In the reverberating silence after the gunshot, Hawk’s voice was almost piercing.

“Where’s Major?” Hawk said quietly. No one said anything.

“Guess he won’t be going down for it,” Hawk said.

No one said a word. All eight stood in perfect stillness. Under the gun like that they didn’t seem frightful. They seemed like scared kids whose prank had gotten out of hand. They were that, but they were the other thing too, they were kids who would shoot a fourteen-year-old girl and her three-month-old baby. They were kids who would gun down her boyfriend and leave him as a statement. That was the hard part, remembering that they weren’t inhuman predators, and that they were. One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

“Any of you guys read Wallace Stevens?” I said. No one spoke. The shotgun felt solid and weighty as I held it. The faint smell of the exploded shell lingered.

“We’ll check the slug that killed Tallboy,” Hawk said. “And we’ll check the Tec-9, and we’ll see whose prints are on it.”

Hawk let his gaze rest quietly on the kid who’d first made a move for the gun.

“You the shooter, Shoe?”

Hawk was making it up as he went along. It wasn’t clear to me that the Tec-9 would fire even a test round anymore, and it probably had more prints on it than a subway door, but Shoe seemed impressed.

“I didn’t trace nobody,” he said.

“You think you won’t go down for it?” Hawk said. “You think maybe you gotta lot of influence downtown, and they won’t drop you in a jar as soon as we bring you in? If we feel like bringing you in?”

“I didn’t trace Tallboy,” Shoe said.

“Don’t matter if you did or didn’t,” Hawk said. “We prove you did and it’s one less problem for Double Deuce. Fact we prove you all accessories and we got Double Deuce’s problems solved.”

“We didn’t do nothing.” It was a fat kid they called Goodyear. His voice had an asthmatic whisper around the edges of it. “We just looking out the window, see what’s happening.”

“We got you at the scene of a crime, with the murder weapon,” I said. “There’s three unsolved murders cleaned up if we can tag you with them. You think we can’t?”

“Shoe didn’t do it,” Goodyear said.

“Yeah, he did,” Hawk said.

“No,” Shoe said. His voice had outrage in it. The other kids muttered that he really hadn’t. “He didn’t,” Goodyear said.

“Move out,” Hawk said. “We’ll call downtown from my car.”

Nobody moved. Still holding the shotgun in one hand, Hawk put the muzzle against Shoe’s upper lip, right under his nose.

“Going down anyway, Shoe, may as well die here as Walpole.”

“They don’t burn nobody in this state,” Shoe said.

“For killing a three-month-old baby?” Hawk smiled.

“I never done that,” Shoe said.

“And her momma.”

“No,” Shoe said, his head tipped back a little by the pressure of the shotgun muzzle.

“And Tallboy. You be lucky to make it to Walpole.”

“No,” Shoe said.

“Course it coulda been Major,” he said.

“No. Major didn’t,” Shoe said.

Hawk was silent for a long time while we all stood there and waited. Finally he lowered the shotgun.

“Beat it,” he said.

They all stood motionless for a moment, then Shoe walked past him and out the open door. One by one they followed. No one spoke. In a moment it was just Hawk and me alone in the dingy room with the damaged remnants of a Tec-9.