Pipe Dream (6 page)

“Okay, I’ll hold for the sergeant. I’m holdin’ for the sergeant,” Black said to Leroy in a stage whisper, placing his hand over the mock receiver.

“Yeah, Sergeant? Dig this here, Sarge, I ain’t kill nobody, but here go the nigger right here. Lee-roy John-son. L-E-R . . .” He paused, as if he were listening.

“Oh, you know how to spell it? All right, well, I’m at 3934 Dell Street. And I’ll hold him till you get here. Hurry up before he put his shirt on.”

“Everett,” Clarisse said. “This is not a joke.”

“Yeah, but I gotta laugh to keep from cryin’,” Black said. “I shoulda known by the way y’all looked when I seen y’all on Broad Street.”

“Look, Black, I ain’t kill nobody,” Leroy said soberly. “Rock did it. I just walked up on dude and went up in his socks. And I found this.”

Leroy reached into his sock and pulled out a wad of hundreds and fifties.

“I went out the front window on the second floor and ran across the roofs. Then I gave this hack two hundred ones to let me use his ride. I was gettin’ ready to pull off when Pookie and Rock and Butter—”

“Look, man, save the details. Just tell ’em Rock did it. What, you gon’ do life for that nigger?”

“Rock dead,” Leroy said.

“He what?”

“I crashed the car up on Wayne Avenue. That’s why they think we up there somewhere.”

“What you mean
we
?” Black said, growing angry.

“Black, they know we roll together. They probably just assumed we was together again. Now, you can stand there till they walk up in here and lock us all up. Or you can help me get outta this.”

Black looked at him, speechless, and began to understand the gravity of their situation.

“So what it’s gon’ be, nigger? ’Cause ain’t neither one of us got time to be standin’ up talkin’ ’bout it.”

“Why should I help you?” Black said. “Give me one good reason.”

“I’ll give you a thousand.” Leroy peeled off ten hundreds.

Black looked at the money, then at Leroy, and the dope fiend inside told him that he could escape from Alcatraz for one thousand dollars.

“All right,” he said after a lengthy silence. “Let’s do this.”

Chapter 6

A
fter nearly two hours of gathering evidence, the police were ready to remove Podres’s body from the house. Channels 3, 6, 10, 17, and 29 were carrying the crime scene live, with so-called experts providing commentary via satellite as to why a politician might be frequenting a crack house. Everything from the Marion Barry–like conspiracy theory to the undercover-investigation-gone-awry theory was being advanced. But no one really cared about any of that. They were just talking to buy time until the police walked out to the van with the zippered body bag.

When the television reporters saw the officers walking into the house with the bag, all the cameramen started positioning themselves to get the best shot. It didn’t matter whether it was stated. Everyone knew that city councilman Johnny Podres was going to be carried out of that house, and the body-bag piece would be good for at least a week’s worth of dramatic replays.

Ramirez knew that. And he was determined not to be a part of it. So he tried to walk in unnoticed behind the officers with the body bag. Before he could take five steps, the reporters were on him.

“Lieutenant Ramirez!” Jeanette Deveraux shouted.

“No comment,” he said, before she got a chance to ask a question.

“Lieutenant Ramirez!” the other reporters began to shout, creating an almost riotlike atmosphere of people yelling and cameramen jostling for position.

“No comment,” he said as he worked his way through the crowd, trying hard not to give in to his desire to push somebody down.

When he got to the door, he leaned against the doorjamb for a minute to catch his breath. “Are they ready to bring the body out?” he said to the young detective who was helping him to keep the scene under control.

“Zippin’ him up now,” the detective said. “The family just called back, too. The wife and daughter said they’ll meet you at the medical examiner’s.”

“Does the medical examiner know that I’ll be sitting in on the autopsy?”

“I spoke with an autopsy technician a few minutes ago. They’re waiting for you.”

“Thanks.”

As he prepared to walk out the door, Ramirez straightened his tie and ran his fingers through his hair. He hated attending autopsies almost as much as he hated meeting victims’ families. Yet there he was, about to do both. He was still trying to convince himself that it would be worth the sacrifice, when Reds Hillman walked up behind him.

“You know, you’re never going to figure this thing out like that,” Hillman said.

Ramirez turned around to face him. “What do you mean?”

“You’re going down to the medical examiner’s to watch an autopsy, for God’s sake. You’re not a doctor. What the hell are you going to learn from an autopsy?”

“It’s not like I’m going to be weighing organs,” Ramirez said defensively. “I just want to be there when the medical examiner declares this thing a homicide so we can get all the warrants we need quickly.”

“Lieutenant, you’re going to have to excuse me for being so blunt, but screw the warrants. You wanna know where to find Leroy? Talk to the people he knows. He’s got a friend who lives right around the corner here. If you want, I’ll take you around there and we can have a little talk with him.”

Ramirez hesitated. But as he watched the grizzled detective with the curly red hair and the smooth stroll make his way to the car, he couldn’t help thinking that Hillman was the one person who could help him to sift through the facts to find the truth.

“Come on, Lieutenant, take a ride with me,” Hillman said.

Ramirez waited half a beat, then walked out to the car just as the body was carried from the house. The reporters ignored Ramirez as they flocked toward the body bag, and the detectives rode the two blocks to Leroy’s friend’s house undisturbed.

When they arrived, a man with an easy smile answered the door.

“I was wondering how long it would take for you to get here, Reds,” he said, opening the door and extending his hand to Hillman. “Come on in.”

“John, this is Lieutenant Ramirez,” Hillman said. “I know you probably heard by now . . .”

“I know. You’re looking for Leroy. News travels fast around here.”

“Me and John go way back,” Hillman said to Ramirez. “I was a beat cop in the 23rd when they used to gang war back in the seventies. I watched him and Leroy grow up.”

“No offense, Reds, but I don’t really have a lot of time to talk about the good old days.”

Ramirez turned his attention to John. “I need to find your friend.”

“Why?”

“You tell me. You said that news travels fast.”

“If it’s the same news I heard, I can tell you right now. Leroy didn’t shoot anybody.”

“How do you know that?” Ramirez said. “Were you there?”

“I know because I’ve known Leroy for more than twenty years. I’m probably the only friend he’s got left. Everybody else is either dead or in jail.”

“So when was the last time you saw him?” Ramirez said.

“Maybe a month ago. He used to come around sometimes when he was hungry and I’d get my wife to make him some chicken or something. But I think he’s too proud to come around now. I hear he’s looking real bad.”

Ramirez’s patience was wearing thin. “What can you tell us about him that we don’t already know?”

“Look. I know you said you don’t want to talk about the old days, but you’ve gotta understand who Leroy is before you start running around saying he shot somebody.”

“Okay,” Ramirez said, taking out a notepad. “Who is he?”

“First I gotta tell you where he came from,” he said with a wistful smile. “Thirtieth and Columbia—Cecil B. Moore now. He came from a time when Philly was real crazy. Especially North Philly and West Philly. Everybody had a gang, and you couldn’t even leave the block without worrying that you’d never make it home.

“You had the Valley, Redner Street, the Moroccos, Zulu Nation, Hoopes Street out in West Philly, Brick Yard and the Hollow up in Germantown. And you had 30th Street Nation down around 30th and Columbia.

“By the time I came along, everything was out of hand. It wasn’t just chains and bats and car antennas anymore. It was zip guns and twelve-gauge shotguns and .38s. It was another dead body every day and brothers doing life in Graterford. It was babies growing up without daddies, and mommies ending up prostitutes, turning tricks for pimps who strung them out on heroin.

“It was like the same thing that’s going on now, only it was less about the street dealers fighting over corners and money than it was about a people fighting for an identity. Whatever money was made from the heroin trade went to the Mafia boys in South Philly, so big-time drug dealers were almost nonexistent. You didn’t see a lot of young boys riding in Benzes and BMWs like you do now. You saw maybe a couple of pimps and a couple of drug dealers driving Caddies around the neighborhood. The rest of us were just stuck, killing one another over worthless corners. You know, Martin was dead, Malcolm was dead, and every other day it seemed like another one of our boys was dead. After a while, it was like, you wanted to be dead yourself, because you just didn’t care anymore.”

Ramirez looked at him and tried to understand what all this had to do with Leroy.

“I used to sit up nights and wonder how I was going to get out of it,” he said. “Sometimes I even thought about just blowing my own brains out so I wouldn’t have to worry about somebody else doing it. It was that bad. You know, it was like, every other day there was a funeral. We would try to come in, just to view the body or whatever, and the boy’s mom would be there like, screaming that we were the reason her baby was dead. After a while, it was hard to believe that we weren’t the reason. At least it was for me.

“But knowing we were the reason that so many people were dying wasn’t enough to stop the young boys from joining. Well, that’s not really true, because looking back now, I guess they really didn’t have any choice. You were either with us or you were against us. And if you lived in the neighborhood and you weren’t in the gang, you were against us. The only ones we really let slide were the athletes—basketball players or whatever—and the drug addicts.

“Leroy couldn’t play basketball. And he wasn’t on dope. Not yet. He was just a young boy, thirteen years old. He lived right there on Oxford Street. I remember seeing him going to the store for his mother one day, and going through the roo the next day. Everybody had to hit him and kick him. That’s what the roo was—like two lines of guys. And you had to go down the middle and let them beat you down to prove you were tough enough to join the gang. Can you imagine that? A little boy coming through a line of damn near grown men, taking all kinds of punches and kicks, just to be initiated into a gang that he might or might not live to say he’d been a member of.

“I’ll never forget how he looked when he came out of that line. His eye was swelling, his bottom lip was split down the middle, and he was trying hard not to limp where someone had kicked him in the knee. But he was smiling the most incredible smile, as if he’d achieved everything he’d ever wanted in life.

“I don’t think it really dawned on me right then that this was someone who really didn’t belong there. I don’t think I even cared. But the more he hung around, the more he came with us to the gang wars, the more he stood on the corner with us and drank Wild Irish Rose, the more it seemed like he was different from the rest of us. He never said much, because he had that stutter, and I guess he didn’t really want to give anybody a reason to mess with him.

“But there were so many things about him that separated him from the rest of us. I mean, the boy just had heart. If we were outnumbered and we had to run back to the neighborhood, Leroy was always the last to go. He was the smallest one, but he would be the last one to go, covering the rear so the rest of us could get away. He would draw up plans like some kind of little general. Using abandoned houses as staging areas, setting up the gang wars so we had whoever we happened to be rumbling outflanked, using cars almost like foxholes, setting things up so that we attacked in waves instead of all at once. The boy was smart. I think the only reason he wasn’t the leader was he was too small. But even that didn’t stop him. He fought when he had to fight, took his lumps with the rest of us, got locked up when he had to. Didn’t talk much, like I said. But the way he looked at you, it was like he could see everything you were thinking. It was like he had this sixth sense about everything that wasgoing on around him. It was like he’d been here before.

“One time I asked him something right before we went out to fight the Valley. I said, ‘Leroy, who’s not going to make it back?’ And when I said it, I was just joking, you know? But Leroy took it seriously. He acted like he didn’t hear me. Then he looked at this boy named Porkchop and nodded his head.”

He paused, trying to compose himself as the memory came flooding back to him.

“That night, Porkchop got shot in the chest with a twelve-gauge,” he said, shaking his head. “The guy just ran up to him and shot him. And Porkchop slumped over a fire hydrant, like a rag doll.”

His eyes lost their focus, like he was caught up in a trance.

“The way the blood was pouring out of his chest,” he said in a soft monotone, “it looked like the hydrant was leaking this bright red water. And Porkchop was bent over, trying to turn it off. It was almost like, if somebody would have come by with one of those wrenches, they could have stopped the leak and everything would’ve been all right.”

Ramirez shifted uncomfortably.

“Everybody scattered. I remember I dropped the car antenna I had and ran toward 30th Street. We didn’t want to leave him there, but he was dead already, and there was nothing else we could do. So we ran. We ran and we screamed and we tried hard not to cry. And then we bought some wine like that was going to make it go away.

“When we got back, I just looked at Leroy. I was almost kind of scared of him, to tell you the truth, because I thought he had some kind of crazy powers or something. I don’t know, maybe that was the Wild Irish Rose talking. But I know I never looked at Leroy the same way after that. None of us really looked at ourselves the same way after that.”

He stopped and gripped the bridge of his nose. Then he breathed in deeply and went on.

“On the day of the funeral,” he said, “we all came to the church and stood in the back. The family didn’t want us there, but we weren’t bothering anybody, so it really didn’t matter. Nobody said anything to us and we didn’t say anything to them, either. Everything was fine. The preacher said his little piece about the gang wars and how we were in the final days. The choir got up and sang ‘Amazing Grace.’ The women cried, the children cried, the grandmother passed out, and the men all looked at us like it was our fault. Everything was going like it was supposed to go. As soon as the guys from the funeral home got up to close the casket, though, all hell broke loose.

“The guys from the Valley ran up in the church and flipped the casket over in the middle of the aisle. At first, we were like, frozen. And then—it was like somebody yelled, ‘Action!’ or something—it was just like we were out in the street. They tried to run back down the aisle, but they were trapped inside the church, stuck between us and the family. We kicked their behinds, and by the time they got out of the church, a lot of them were too hurt to even make it out of the neighborhood. The cops came and arrested some of them, but none of us got arrested, because we hid in a couple of abandoned houses across the street.

“When we came out, we caught one of them trying to stagger up the street. The rest of them had either run away or gotten arrested, so he was on his own. When he saw us, he tried to run, but we grabbed him and dragged him into one of the houses. Frank Nitty—that’s what our leader called himself back then—told this dude to go and get some rope or some string or something to tie him up with. While we waited for the guy to come back with the rope, we beat that boy unconscious like three times. Every time he would pass out, we would make him wake up and knock him out again. By the time dude came back with the rope, the guy didn’t even look like the same person anymore. His whole head was swollen.